On Valentine’s Day, I gave my friend two dove chocolates and told him to save them for later to see if we were chocolate soulmates. Dove chocolates have sweet messages written in the inside, and every so often two of them are the same. The next day, I was doing homework in his room when he reminded me about the chocolates. We both opened ours, and I read mine first:

“Be a little mysterious”

“Really? Cuz that’s mine too,” he responded. I thought he was pulling my leg, but it really was! Ecstatic at this sweet coincidence, I wanted to memorialize the moment for posterity. I asked him to flatten his aluminum wrapper while I did the same, but I accidentally made a hole in mine. On his wall now hangs two identical chocolate wrappers (albeit one a little tattered), with captions declaring us as “Chocolate Soulmates”. While I was still experiencing the lingering feelings of the joyful high, he said, “How many distinct messages are there, because we could calculate the probablity of that happening.”

I like to think that there is some Valentine’s Day spirit that guards over us on February 14th. The VDay spirit infects us with happiness and protects us from sadness. It can even control the weather; the weeklong interminable rain that had been cursing all of campus with Seasonal Affective Disorder was interupted on Saturday by bright rays of sunshine and clear blue skys; the next day, the rain resumed again.

Call it ignorance if you choose – yet despite my logical side, there is still a little part of me that holds on to the belief that maybe things do happen for a reason.

“Suddenly, I feel like a fist is clenching my fish and every muscle in my body is constricted.”

This sentence was tucked away in my post about insomnia. I have no idea what word I meant to write there… it was 7 am in the morning, I had just spent the past 9 hours reading ancient Chinese philosophical cannons… but I guess I was thinking about fish.

I must be prophetic, because the next day, my friend asked me if I could take care of her fish over the weekend while she visits her perfect boyfriend (that lucky bitch). The job isn’t too complicated: turn on and off the heater at appropriate times of the day, feed them twice a day (not more to avoid eutrophication), and add more water if any evaporates. Although every pet I’ve ever owned had a shorter lifespan than average (I don’t think coincidentally), I think I can handle four days of fish.

It’s a powerful feeling to have ten beings whose livelihoods completely depend on me. Every time I approach the tank, all ten swim up towards the glass, expectantly staring at me with those eyes that never close; and then I get this giddy feeling inside of me, like I hold the fate for whether they live or die, but I’m going to be a nice fuzzy caring person and choose to feed them.

A lot of self-help blogs will tell you to help others to find happiness. We all know why, so I’m not going to talk about that. Rather, I am going to talk about the pitfalls about caring too much.

Helping others is fundamentally about power dynamics. You can only help others if you hold more power than they do. We help them, because they are too powerless to help themselves. The reason we get that warm fuzzy feeling inside after helping others isn’t because deep down inside, we are good people, but rather because it gives us self-validation, while establishing the powerlessness of the other. Sometimes the people we try to help don’t even want our help, yet we help them anyway because we think we know better than they do about what is best for them. In the meantime, we impose our values and philosophies onto another who doesn’t necessarily share those same beliefs. (Think proselytizers, IMF, World Bank, even Peace Corps).

Ever notice that when self-help advocates helping others, the ultimate purpose is to help yourself? We spend one day volunteering, and come back feeling all good about ourselves. Not to mention, we let everyone around use know about what a good person we are, and it looks great on our resume and applications.
Last night I had a conversation with a good friend who exclaimed to me her frustration with having to show law schools that she cared by volunteering with an NGO. When was the last time you volunteered somewhere and didn’t put it on your resume?

In the meantime, what kind of improvement have we made in the lives of those who received our assistance? What kind of sustainable, significant difference have we effected, other than the reaffirmation of their inferiority and the encouragement of their reliance on charity?

In the end, who really gains from your good will?

I am not advocating that we should not help anyone. I just hope that the next time you help someone, examine your own motivations – and I mean really question them. If you come up with a conclusion that you don’t like that much, don’t blame yourself, we are all only humans (read: self-interested economical beings) afterall. The fact that you’ve acknowledged your motivations already puts you one level above all the other fuzzy-hearted people.