Help Wanted (Not)
I have been working on becoming a better person.
So far, this has mostly involved helping fewer people.
I realize this sounds less like personal growth and more like something a parole board would note with concern. But hear me out.
I have learned that people need considerably less of my help than I once imagined.
(Shocking, I know.)
The funny thing is, I don’t think I’m unusual.
Most of us carry around the conviction that we’d improve other people’s lives if they’d just give us five uninterrupted minutes. We’d organize their kitchen differently. We’d raise their children differently. We’d vote differently. We’d marry someone else entirely.
We don’t just have opinions. We have plans for people.
The urge to help is especially powerful around technology.
Young people see anyone over fifty holding a phone and immediately assume there has been an accident.
“Do you need help?”
“No.”
“You know you can just swipe up.”
“Yes.”
“Here, let me show you.”
At which point they take the phone from someone who once performed his own taxes using a pencil and begin swiping and pinching at the screen as if demonstrating fire to a medieval farmer.
The owner stands there politely, watching a complete stranger reorganize his digital life.
There seems to be an age at which other people decide you can no longer be trusted with electronics. I’m not sure what it is, but apparently it arrives before your AARP card.
Older people are no better.
They hear someone under thirty talk about politics, careers, marriage, money, or just about anything, and you can actually watch the advice forming.
The head tilts.
The eyebrows lift.
A hand lands gently on the younger person’s shoulder.
“Can I offer you some advice?”
No. You may not.
Not because the advice is necessarily bad. It may be excellent. You may possess the accumulated wisdom of seventy years, three marriages, two bankruptcies, a bypass, and something involving a timeshare in Aruba.
Keep it.
Nobody wants wisdom nearly as much as people with wisdom want to distribute it.
This surprised me because I always assumed helping was good. The older I get, the more I suspect that helping is sometimes less about solving another person’s problem than securing a speaking part in it.
There are exceptions, of course.
If someone is trapped beneath a refrigerator, help them. Nobody pinned beneath a Frigidaire is thinking, I really need to work through this myself.
Everything else is less clear.
We see someone doing something incorrectly and feel compelled to intervene. But incorrectly according to whom?
Maybe they like spending twenty minutes figuring out the parking app. Maybe they want to vote for the candidate you think is an idiot. Maybe they want to marry Kevin.
Everyone has a Kevin.
You can explain Kevin. You can produce charts about Kevin. You can invite three former Kevins to testify.
They are still going to marry Kevin.
And perhaps they should.
Because mistakes are part of living. Some of the most important things I know came from doing things people specifically advised me not to do.
The irritating part is that many of those people were right. But being right doesn’t mean they should have stopped me.
There are lessons you can be told and lessons you have to learn, like ordering the fish because the waiter quietly asked, “From here?” and you mistook concern for hospitality.
That belongs to you.
Obviously, there are people who need help and cannot ask for it. We should notice them. We should probably become much better at noticing them. This is the inconvenient exception that ruins an otherwise perfectly good theory.
But most of the time, when I see someone struggling, I try something radical.
I wait.
If they need me, I hope I’m paying enough attention to know it.
Otherwise, I let them be. I let them choose. I let them marry Kevin.
And when I hear someone say, “Can I offer you some advice?” I simply say, “No.”
Then I walk away before either of us has the opportunity to become a better person.