In this world, there are a heck of a lot of people. Some of them are good, some are bad, most are somewhere in between. Lately, Katie and I have been watching NBC's The Good Place through the magic portal AKA Netflix. We've binged hard on the first two seasons. It's been a long time since I've felt this excited for a TV show (or anything else really). Ethics and morality is something that has always interested me because I've always thought of myself as having an impeccable moral compass. That being said, having a knowledge of what is good and bad, doesn't always mean one will always do good. I have been selfish too many times to count in all of my 27 & 1/2 years and if anything, I'm not kind enough to strangers, I'm not putting enough good out into the world. I would say since about 2009, I've become more and more reserved each year. It's as if something in me broke after graduating high school and it's been unsettling to finally come to that realization. I remember leaving high school pretty excited for college and my idea for my future was that I would become a doctor - specifically a family practitioner. For me it was never going to be about the money, though arguably a family doctor still makes pretty good money compared to the average. What I'm trying to get at is that I enjoy helping people, I enjoy making people laugh, I enjoy building people up, though some people make all those things really hard to do. Ultimately, I cannot control other people, but it's not about that either. It took me a long time to realize that. I can do all these nice things for people, but it doesn't necessarily make them a better person. Without thinking about it, I guess I felt like if I did nice things for others and that made them better, the world would get a little bit better, and I would be doing essentially a BIG good. It really doesn't work like that though. For one, as similar as we all are to each other, we all live vastly different lives. That means there's not really a cure all solution for any individuals morality because everyone is going to have their own unique viewpoint on what is right and wrong. Most people might agree upon something like killing being wrong but there are always going to be outliers or people might make an exception in certain circumstances. I literally feel bad whenever I squish a bug, but even I can imagine a vengeance-seeking type of scenario where someone killed my family and I punish them severely. I'm so very thankful that that type of scenario hasn't actually happened and it also scares me to think that I would make an exception for myself to commit murder in that case. Life is not a movie and it is not a comic book, though it does borrow heavily from both.
Anyway, I feel like I've gotten slightly off topic here. I don't want to focus on creating a cure all solution of morality. I want to define what it means to be a good person for myself. Something that is airtight and can be an example for my kids to see whenever I have them. But first, I need to accept that no one is perfect. No one can be perfect because we are all animals either created by happy accident of the universe via evolution or God tinkering around for many millenia until we came to be this Kardashian-watching trashy-but-loveable mess that we are today. I am far from perfect, though I try to make it seem like I am, which brings me to my first part - my motivation for being a good person. Before I waste my own time defining what it means to be a good person, I need to figure out what my motivation is to be one. The tricky part is that if my motivation is selfish, is it even worth it to be a good person. Sure, others could potentially benefit, but if my motivation is selfish, shouldn't my actions serve to benefit me over others? What I want my motivation to be is that being a good person who does good things for others is the be all, end all goal with no strings attached. I'm not doing those things to win friends, or influence, or power, or money, I'm simply doing them for the intrinsic good. I remember from my college ethics class that some philosopher said there is no truly altruistic action or something like that. It's been hard to shake that notion ever since. I sometimes do nice things and I sometimes expect nice things to happen to me as a result. But life is a big ol' fruit tree and sometimes it hands you very sour lemons with bugs in and on them regardless of how much you've fertilized it and whispered sweet nothings into its big silly fruit tree ear. Then, on some days after doing nothing at all, life will hand you whatever your favorite fruit is and say "here, go crazy." It just doesn't make any sense. From now on, my motivation for being a good person will be just for the intrinsic value of doing a nice thing... essentially, doing the nice thing is the reward and I don't deserve anything special for doing it.
Oh yeah, what does it mean to me to be a good person? I think it is striking a balance between caring for others and self-care. It's really easy to let one of the two become your sole focus and you either become a narcissistic demon or an empty husk of a human going through the motions and waiting for your life to end. Two very dramatic examples, sure, but it gets the point across. Along with finding that balance and fighting everyday to keep it, I think being a good person requires another kind of balance - a balance between honesty and tact. I generally think being honest is a great characteristic but some people are viciously honest in a way that isn't conducive to a positive environment. Others can be too reserved and maybe hide what is eating them up inside for too long, or maybe they flake out on a lot of plans because they were too scared to tell the other person they didn't want to do those plans anyway. The more I think about it, being a good person is one great big balancing act, because there are a lot of benefits to being brash and bold but also being reserved and careful. It seems to me that a blend of all would be the right way to live life. At the same time, one would have to be decisive, there isn't necessarily a lot of time to explore all of the possibilities of every quandary one might have to face. It think the balance between decisiveness and cautiousness comes from making morally good choices to begin with. Eventually it becomes easier to trust your gut (and minimize over-cautiousness) by learning to automatically make the right choice after constant practice.
Ultimately, I think it might take a lifetime of studies to tackle what it means to be a good person. And right now, I'm feeling a bit lazy, but at least I wrote all of this. I want to come back to this question more and more, and I want to continue to define it. This was really just a starting line on a marathon that I hope to finish. This was really just a piece of tape stuck to a wall attached to an endless roll of tape that is being carried by a monkey and I hope the tape runs out. This was really a loose thread on a grammy-knit sweater that may never truly become unraveled but I'll still be mostly naked if I keep pulling and that's good enough.
