Does True Altruism Really Exist?
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Yurui’s Summary
We tell ourselves that we want to help others for the sake of helping them. But we get a ton of dopamine from helping people, as a result of telling ourselves that we helped someone.
True altruism probably doesn’t exists. But at the end of the day, helping others is a great thing to do, because it results in a net positive for society, and you feel good about it at the same time.
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To some, this might seem like a pretty stupid question. I dare you to read on.
In my life, I’ve had my fair share of helping people; I think we all have some memory of our own altruistic endeavours. Whether it be something as simple as helping someone pick up a pen they’ve dropped, to something like being available for a 1-on-1 chat about life, to something as impactful as creating a blog that has reached thousands of people (thanks so much for all of your kind messages!), I’ve noticed that there’s a few things that these acts all hold in common.
Firstly, of course, the person that I’m helping gets helped. Simple, right? We all tell ourselves that we want to help another person for the sake of helping them. Their day becomes better.
But the other thing that I’ve realised is that every time that we help someone (with kudos to James Clear’s book Atomic Habits), and every time that we perform that sort of habit, we execute a four-step pattern: cue, craving, response, reward. With regards to this framework, we can deduce that we often crave to help people because of the reward that we give ourselves: this hormone that we call dopamine, that comes as a result of telling yourself that you ‘helped someone out’.
I’m not saying that this is a bad thing; more like something that I think should be acknowledged (though ignorance is often bliss). Helping people out is a massive net-positive to society. Firstly, you made someone else’s day better, without much hindrance to your own (hopefully). We also feel better about ourselves when we help others as well.
TL;DR: true altruism probably doesn’t exists; we only help others because we want the dopamine afterwards, to know that we 'helped' someone. But at the end of the day, helping others is a great thing to do, because it results in a net positive for society, and you feel good about it at the same time.
This is why I think that humans are inherently good people. I love Naval Ravikant’s argument that life is a single-player game, and that all our experiences and perceptions of life exist within us. It’s definitely helped me embody a more Stoic/Daoist perspective towards life, alongside learned optimism, and explanatory styles. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND doing some reading into these concepts of philosophy and psychology, as it’s so worthwhile of an investment to learn more about how we can perceive the world.
But as one of my ex-teachers told me, “The reward of life and living is not money or awards, or recognition gained, but the respect/love people have for you, simply knowing that you have made things better for someone. They in turn achieve their goals. It is to make everyone's life more pleasant.”
Yurui
