Full disclosure: I am not a very altruistic person. I have never donated my blood. As far as I remember, I have never donated clothes, money or anything else for any disaster relief fund. I have never volunteered at any shelter home or charity, except for the 60 hours of compulsory service at an orphanage in Mumbai in college. And teaching those unruly, ungrateful children did not bring me any sense of real joy or contentment. But I must be doing something wrong, right? Because studies repeatedly link altruism with a ‘helper’s high’.
In fact, the term ‘helper’s high’ was coined in the late 1980s, when researcher Allan Luks studied over 3,000 Americans involved in volunteer services and found that they all reported feelings of happiness that lasted weeks. The helper’s high, he discovered, is not just a feeling, but leads to improvements in the body’s immunity and lowers stress hormones.
Jorge Moll at the National Institutes of Health found that when you donate money, the mesolimbic system in the brain is activated, releasing feel-good neurotransmitters such as oxytocin and vasopressin. Even more interestingly, researchers found that the same area of the brain that is activated in response to sex or food is activated when people even thought about altruism.
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So I circle back to my question: why did I not get any joy or satisfaction from teaching those orphans in college? Was I just wired wrong? My theory is that altruism for altruism’s sake never works. Unless one does it out of genuine empathy and compassion, the promised happiness might remain out of reach.
If the feeling that animates the action of altruism is not genuine, then can the feeling that results from it be so? And unfortunately, in the age of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, when cruelty and callousness are glorified, the value of empathy has taken a hit; it is now seen as a weakness. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, for example, Musk criticised the Democrats for succumbing to “suicidal empathy”. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy,” he said. “They’re exploiting a bug in western civilisation, which is the empathy response.”
Let me just contrast this with one story from the life of Dr Paul Brand, the famous hand surgeon who worked with hundreds of leprosy patients in CMC Vellore. One day, he got an urgent summons to the ward of a throat cancer patient—Mrs Twigg. An artery in the back of her throat had eroded and blood was spilling from her mouth. Brand thrust his finger into her mouth and pressed on the pulsing spot. He found the artery and pressed it shut. After 10 minutes, he tried to remove his hand, but the moment he did so, the blood started spilling again and Mrs Twigg looked panicked. So, the two sat like that for nearly two hours while waiting for the surgeon, with Mrs Twigg’s imploring eyes never leaving him.
“I will never know how I lasted that second hour,” writes Brand in his book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. “My muscles cried out in agony. My fingertips grew numb... the cramping four-inch length of my finger, so numb I could not even feel it, was the strand that kept life from falling away.” It was only when the surgeon came and the operating table was prepared that Brand could remove his finger. Mrs Twigg could not speak, for she had no larynx, but Brand could sense her gratitude. She knew how the good doctor’s muscles had suffered and he knew her fear. For those two hours, it was like they had almost become one person, Brand writes.
This might not be altruism in the conventional sense of the word, but it was an act done with the right motive. It saved one’s life and gave a profound sense of contentment to the other. Aristotle once said that anybody can become angry—that is easy. “But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy,” he said.
Maybe the same can be said of altruism. To give in the right way to the right person the right gift at the right time is an art. And perhaps, in this Christmas season of giving, it is only genuine empathy that can be an effective compass in directing how to give well.