Are You A Good Person?

Gordon Gekko may have preached that greed is good, but science claims that giving is great. Performing selfless acts is purported to improve your emotional health, boost your cardio vascular system, and even make you happier. But is altruism all it’s cracked up to be?

- Ben Smithurst

PART 1: OUR HERO . . . AWAKES FROM SELF-DELUSION I think I’m a nice guy. Or I thought I was. So when my editors (smirkingly) proposed I do an altruistic challenge (“You need to be good for a month – give money to beggars, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help old ladies across the street”), I was slightly worried.

I mean, how much nicer can I possibly be? Or, at least, without becoming very dull? (Nice people are mostly dull.) I already help friends move, surrender my bus seat to the infirm, pick up a round at the bar. I’m the one – me! – who gets up to comfort our one-year-old when he wakes up at night, screaming like a baby Steven Tyler who’s caught his head in a gate. I recycle. I bought a reusable coffee cup. It’s around here somewhere... maybe in the cupboard?

I’m practically a saint. But then I tell my wife about the story.

“Ooh,” she says, “that’s hard. You can be pretty selfish.”

“What? No, I can’t. You can!”

“Babe.”

“I let people in in traffic. You don’t even drive!”

“No,” she says. “You swear at everyone.

You have terrible road rage; it’s scary. You only ever do what you want to do. We hardly ever see my friends.”

“But they’re bor–” “You won’t go out unless it’s to the bar across the road. You only holiday where there’s surf. You went on a surf trip when I was seven months pregnant! Surfing is a selfish sport. And you have to ‘win’ every conversation. You’re doing it now.”

“That’s not... oh.”

So maybe I’m a self-described saint like Kanye is a self-described messiah. But can a cartoonishly un-self-aware man-child with cloddish tendencies and minimal impulse corner in just a month?