Imagine you are standing at a train station, waiting for the train. Next to you is a ticket machine. A stranger in a suit comes up to you and asks you politely whether you have a few coins to spare, they forgot their wallet at home and need to catch the train back. What do you do? It would seem massively rude to ignore this well-dressed, obviously decent stranger, wouldn’t it?
Now picture yourself standing on the road, waiting for the bus. Someone comes up to you on the road and asks you for a few bucks. They have bags under their eyes. Their clothes are shabby, they look like they could do with a sandwich, and maybe a good wash. Do you avert your eyes? Mumble something incomprehensible and turn them away?
What is it that makes us turn away someone who is in a permanent state of need, as opposed to someone who has enough, but has happened to become unlucky on one particular day? Why do we feel more obligated to help someone who we might relate to? Is it because we think we are immune to “permanency of need,” but we have all forgotten our wallets before?
When I went to London two years ago, I was walking down an underpass, and there was a guy sitting on the floor on the edge of the pathway. He was reading a book, but he looked up as I was approaching and gave me a radiant smile. He asked me how I was doing with contagious giddiness and held up a paper cup. I immediately felt compelled to help this random person out, this stranger that made me smile. In my head, I was impressed by his good mood despite his apparently dire situation. I did not think about whether he was homeless,
whether he had eaten that day or not. I was more interested in what he was reading, and what he might be so happy about (I have since regretted not stopping to chat), both things I could relate to.
The happy dude on the side of the road made me realise that, had he simply kept reading his book, or had he stared at the floor in desperation, his living situation unchanged, I would not have stopped to fish for change in my pocket. This great irony bugs me: the irony that a person in a far more dire situation may not have been able to muster up a laugh and, as a result, would probably receive less enthusiastic responses; the irony that people who need attention might not get it. It’s like Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her poem “Solitude”: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone” (really, a great poem. If you haven’t read it yet, you really should).
If people are only moved to sympathy through positive emotions, how in the world are people in serious need, who have been in a state of misery for months and can only project desperation,
supposed to find their way back into contentment?
Disclaimer: I do not know anyone who has had to (or chosen to) ask strangers for money. I have no experience with what it is like, and I am not claiming that it is impossible to be happy, or that
all people who are in this situation will act in the same way. Like I said, I have no idea where the happy guy was in his day-to-day life. I just find that there appears to be a fundamental flaw,
kind of an inverse proportionality in how some people, myself included, go about such an encounter.
Why do we suddenly stop feeling responsible?
Posted on 2 August 2017