Here’s the great thing: Even if you truly enjoy being selfish, being unselfish helps you accomplish that.
This issue of SDM is all about the good works being done in San Diego, the stories of people across the city who are participating in the wellness of the whole.
Is it wrong to feel good when you do things that help others? None of us can deny that little zing exists. As if your heart grows a cashmere sweater and your blood is full of magic for a few minutes. There are many ways to feel this high—prayer, gambling, sex, cronuts, exercise, scrolling, meditation, and Phil Collins drum solos all kickstart the dopamine train inside us. Getting sciency, these things send a neurological signal to our “medial forebrain bundle,” the neural Vegas Strip of our brains. Human bodies were designed to be apex pleasure-seeking machines. If we didn’t find significant gratification in food or sex, we’d have a fairly terrible shot at propagating the species. We’d be the joyless turnip that fell off the evolution truck.
Unless your heart is made of kevlar, you physically experience those “hope chills” every time you help. Should we pretend we don’t? After all, this is just normal, base-model human stuff that is expected of sharing a planet with other souls. Maybe we should notice the hairs stand up on our arms, silently pat them back down into submission, and try to think uninspiring thoughts to return us to a bank-transaction level of emotional stasis.
Orrrrrrr…. we could fixate on that high, let it run our lives a little. Chase that feeling of connection and purpose, use it like Ozempic for our egos. Maybe we should lean into the emotional negroni of dopamine and oxytocin that we get from being a helpful participant in someone’s life. We don’t need to strain limbs self-congratulating, but recognize the feeling is awesome, and put it on the calendar as a wellness exercise.
Because if we frame it that way, even the unrepentingly selfish among us have something to gain from helping someone gain. Even if I’m a navel-gazing, id-juggling, actively-learning-chiaroscuro-to-paint-self-portraits kind of person, I should probably sign up with one of the nonprofits in the city and be selfishly unselfish. Just for the high of it all.
I felt that rush watching Deacon Jim Vargas cut the ribbon on Father Joe’s new detox center that helps locals caught in a cycle of homelessness and addiction. Before the center opened, there were only 78 beds in the entire county to help these people. That day, they got 44 more.
I felt it watching some of the chef-titans of the city’s restaurant world mix with farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and food policy makers at the Berry Good Food Foundation’s 10-year anniversary at Herb & Wood. That org, started by Michelle Lerach, works to create a better food world, one that supports all the people who get meals to plates. The foundation has been planting gardens at schools, senior centers, and orphanages on both sides of the border.
I sensed it while I was answering phones this year at the Feeding San Diego telethon, during which elder members of San Diego used an actual phone and called in donations of $5, $200, whatever they could spare. Everyone in the room—chefs, a pro skater, a pro surfer, a member of Switchfoot—felt connected in a way that doesn’t happen unless the metaphorical campfire we’re all gathered around is a cause that helps people who need it.
The feeling came again at This Is About Humanity’s Dia de Los Muertos event, which raised money for Tijuana Sin Nombre, helping our greater, cross-border community in Tijuana.
Hope you get inspired or a hair stands on end as you read how San Diegans are helping other San Diegans. I’m betting few or none of them are selfie-scrolling solipsists, but even if one of them is, doing good helps them accomplish that.
