Aaron Miller - How to Help

Jul 17, 2024 Blog

Hope Is More than Optimism

We typically consider a hopeful person to be the same as an optimistic person, but hope is something more. Dr. Kendra Thomas explains:

“In conversation, ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’ can often be used as synonyms. But there’s an important gap between them, as psychology research suggests.”

I did a podcast episode about hope when I interviewed David Williams, former CEO of the Make-a-Wish Foundation. But I really barely scratched the surface of the research. Here’s a glimpse of what more there is to say:

“Hope is stronger than optimism at predicting academic success and people’s ability to cope with pain. Plenty of scientific evidence suggests that hope improves individuals’ health and boosts their well-being.”

Hope is not the same as optimism | The Conversation

Jul 11, 2024

“Making” Someone Happy

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This is the third article in a short series on how to know the right kind of help to give someone, by thinking about what it means for them to flourish. *If you're enjoying these, have an idea, or need to set me straight, I would love to hear from you with a comment at the bottom this article or via email.*

Most people eventually learn that you can’t make someone like you. If someone decides to hate you or even just mildly dislike you, it’s their choice to make. Of course, there are things that you can do that make it easier for a person to like you: be respectful, be a good listener, be competent, be funny, and so on. But even if you do all of these things, whether or not a person likes you is ultimately outside of your control. You’re destined for bad choices if you try to make it happen anyway.

The same goes for trying to make people happy. Here, I mostly mean the feeling of happiness, the dominant way we think and talk about it. If we think the point of helping is to increase happiness in others, then we’re still on unsteady ground. That’s because another person’s happiness—in the myriad ways people desire it, think about it, experience it, and predict it—is messy and ultimately outside of our control.

We all want happiness, and naturally want it for others and not just ourselves. The economist/philosopher Adam Smith famously wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

Wanting to be happy is something everyone wants, and wanting others to be happy is what a helpful person wants. There’s nothing wrong with this desire. The problem is when we make someone’s happiness the target of our helping actions.

Happiness is mostly an emotion. Being an emotion means that it has at least three attributes that invites the kind of narrow helping behavior I described in a previous newsletter in this series. We’re at the whims of these three difficulties: experience, variety, and subjectivity.

1. Happiness is an experience.

As an experience, the feeling of happiness is fundamentally intermittent. We never experience happiness at sustained levels consistently over time. If someone’s happiness is the goal of helping, then you’re at the mercy of these very natural swings they experience. Any dip from a state of happiness might prompt you to jump in, typically with quick fixes. New parents often fall into this trap with their child, always wanting to placate their offspring in any moment of dissatisfaction. (Better to find the humor in your kid’s fickle, crazy demands.)

The experience of happiness is also hard to replicate, no two moments being exactly the same. Part of this is explained by something called hedonic adaptation. We get accustomed to the things that bring us happiness, so their power to make us happy diminishes. Your favorite song loses its magic the more you hear it, after all. If making someone consistently happy is your goal, you’ll need far more ways to help than are even realistic.

2. Happiness is varied.

The feeling of happiness also isn’t a switch that’s turned on or off. Happiness comes in degrees (where we feel more or less of it) and in a variety of forms (where we feel it in different ways). Because it isn’t a binary state—on or off—“making” someone happy doesn’t really compute because the threshold of happiness can be ill-defined. Just how happy do they need to be for you to meet your goal? 30%, 75%, 100%, or some other amount?

This exact issue applies if you just want to make them happier. Is 50% enough? 20%? 1%? It’s not a bad thing to try and make someone else’s day just a bit happier, and the ways to do that are often quick and easy. But those are often not the same things that make a person’s life sustainably happier. When I recently offered a student some chocolate to lift his spirits, I know for certain that it didn’t finish his finals for him. Don’t get me wrong, respite is a good thing, but not a standalone solution.

And the variety of happy experiences also matters. In any moment of happiness, you might be excited, loving, satisfied, grateful, or serene. Each of these comes from a wide range of predictable and unpredictable circumstances. If you want to make a person “happy,” exactly what kind of happy did you have in mind?

3. Happiness is subjective.

Perhaps the most vexing thing about happiness is how much it differs from one person to the next. We can only experience happiness in our own way. Of course, there are things that all people need for happiness (more on these in a coming newsletter). But no two people have the same internal formula for what makes them happy.

This is why the dominant psychological measure of happiness is called Subjective Well-Being (SWB). This measure contains more than just emotional happiness, but baked into SWB is the recognition that not all happiness is created equal. As Ed Deiner, SWB’s chief contributor, puts it:

The key is that the person himself/herself is making the evaluation of life - not experts, philosophers, or others. Thus, the person herself or himself is the expert here: Is my life going well, according to the standards that I choose to use?

The best way we bridge this subjectivity gap is through empathy, but that only gets us so far. Even the person closest to you probably intensely enjoys something that you despise. My wife somehow enjoys black licorice in a way that defies all reason to me, for example. I can buy her some black licorice, but I don’t really have any way of knowing how much she’ll enjoy it compared to anything else I might get her, all because I can’t stand the stuff.

The other troubling thing we learn from SWB measures is that there are dispositional differences in happiness. Some people are just naturally happier than others; their internal happiness engine runs stronger. Some of this comes from their habits (gratitude, optimism, and prosociality being the most potent ones), but some of our natural state of happiness is just baked in. If you want to make someone happier, you might be working with a person whose baseline is simply lower.

A Worthy Desire, but a Terrible Target

Fundamentally, it’s hard to control our own emotions, let alone someone else’s. And because happiness is inextricable from what someone is feeling in the moment, making someone happy is a frustratingly difficult goal. Just like we have to be okay with moments when people don’t like us, we have to be okay with moments of unhappiness in the people we care about. There might be very good reasons for a person to not like you. Just so for someone’s moment of unhappiness.

Perhaps the best way to summarize is to say that another person’s happiness is a worthy desire but a terrible target. We have a much better chance of helping by targeting the kind of help that we can measure, that we can reliably count on to improve someone’s life.

So in the next article we’ll turn our attention to another common approach: opportunity. What if we just make sure that everyone is simply planted in good soil?

Jun 28, 2024

Flourishing, Intuition, and Precious-Metal Rules

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This is the second article in a short series on how to know the right kind of help to give someone, by thinking about what it means for them to flourish.

In my previous article, I talked about how we often give the wrong kind of help with our heart in the right place. Because we take a too-narrow view on what others need, our help turns out to be not so helpful. I suggested that we should instead take a broader view: what does a person need to flourish?

We most quickly answer the question with simple intuition. It’s a good place to start asking “What would I want if I was in their shoes?” The problem, though, with an intuitive approach is that our intuition often gets it wrong by assuming too much.

Precious-Metal Rules

Consider the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” This version, expressed by Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, is just one of countless formulations found around the world. Here are a few of the hundreds of other examples from the Golden Rule Project:

Judaism: “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow.” - Hillel the Elder
Buddhism: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” - Tripitaka Udana-Varga 5:18
Confucianism: “One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself.” -Mencius Vii.A.4
Hinduism: “This is the sum of the Dharma duty: do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.” - Mahabharata 5:1517
Islam: “None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” - Number 13 of Imam “Al-Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths

And these are just some of the religious formulations. You’ll also find the idea invoked across a wide range of cultures, philosophies, and politics. The Golden Rule is perhaps one of the most widespread maxims in human history. It’s widespread because it teaches something that every person in the world needs to learn: how to think about someone else. We all live in our own heads, and the Golden Rule teaches us to empathize, an essential life skill.

And yet, there are problems in application of the Golden Rule. Before you think I’m about to burst heathen-like onto sacred ground, please consider that no religion has ever taught only the Golden Rule. On its own, the Rule is incomplete.

Here’s the basic challenge embedded in every version of the Golden Rule: we all want different things. To do for someone what I want for myself assumes that they value what I value. Clearly this is not a reliable assumption, for reasons ranging from the trivial (favorite ice cream flavors) to the intractable (political strife). I love donuts and, strange as it seems to me, there are people who don’t.

If you think I’m picking nits, just consider:

The birthday present someone gave you because they love it, or
The unsolicited advice to start the same diet that your friend is on, or
The invitation to Karaoke when the last thing you want is to get on a stage and sing badly in front of strangers.

Wanting different things is exceedingly common, and yet we still have a hard time seeing those desires in others whom we want to help.

This logical pothole in the Golden Rule inspired someone (unknown) to write the Platinum Rule, “Do unto others as they want done unto them.” Of course, this just substitutes one problem for another. Do I help the meth addict afford her next bump? Do I help a murderer make his escape? The Platinum Rule assumes all desires are good for us. (Consider, too, that the police prefer that I help them catch the murderer. The Platinum Rule doesn’t tell me whom to help when interests collide.) Not everything we want is also helpful to us.

Rules Upon Rules, but Incomplete Answers

We can come up with even more rules to address these gaps or conflicts, but then those rules need testing. For example, we might say, “Do unto others as they wish, but don’t do any harm.” Some harm is ethically justified and proper, though. After all, doctors use scalpels. We have a wide range of tools in society that impose harm with moral necessity, like prisons, taxes, and timeouts for my kids. (We might not think of mild punishment as harm, but kids do.)

The point of all of this precious-metal rule-wrangling is that what people need is hard to simplify, so intuition is at best incomplete. Enhancing our intuition with rules—Golden or otherwise—can be useful as quick tests for our behavior, but rules, too, can be inapt for the moment. We need something more, something richer, to understand what makes people flourish.

In the next article, we’ll take a look at happiness. What if we just focus on making the world a happier place?

In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please email me or leave a comment if you have something to share.

Jun 20, 2024

The Wrong Kind of Help

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This is the first article in a short series on how to find the right kind of help to give someone, by thinking about what it means for them to flourish.

It's distressingly common to give the wrong kind of help. I did it to my son just five days ago.

He was doing some tricky homework at 11:15pm that was due at midnight—as one does in college. The assignment was to build a webpage with HTML and CSS, and my knowledge of both is sketchy, at best. Yet here I was suggesting one idea after another to get a stupid menu item to line up correctly on the page. He finally had to tell me (politely, to his credit) that I was squandering the time he had left before it was due. I apologized, told him I believed in his ability to figure it out, and slunk off to bed wishing I'd been more aware of what he needed.

Fortunately, he did figure out a pretty ingenious little solution that he was actually quite proud of, and turned it in just before the deadline. (No way would I have had the same idea, and honestly the thought stings a tiny bit.) I'm relieved that it worked for him, in spite of my clumsy attempt to help.

Do we know how to help?

Perhaps the most frequent mistake in helping someone comes from giving the wrong kind of help. In everyday, small moments, it’s obvious what help to give. Hold open the door for someone. Let a customer with small kids ahead of you in the checkout line. Carry some boxes to your coworker’s car. This sort of help isn’t likely to go wrong.

But here’s a moment that’s probably given you pause: Should you give $5 to the panhandler? It would be a silly question—after all, it’s only $5—if it wasn’t so difficult to answer. How will they spend it? Does this do long-term harm to them? Are you contributing to a bigger problem?

The panhandler example is just the beginning. How do we really know what help to give to others? We don’t easily know what’s right for a total stranger. But we even struggle to answer this question for someone close to us, someone who is weighed down by problems. Do we give them money, lend them an ear, help them make friends, or let them learn to do it on their own? Can we make things worse with our good intentions?

Narrow help

With so much uncertainty, we easily get it wrong and there are many ways to get it wrong. Let's explore the most common mistake: thinking too narrowly about the help that is needed. Perhaps one of these examples of narrow help rings true to you:

A dad is so worried about his son’s grades that it comes up in every conversation with him.
A woman stops talking to her friend who insists on dating the guy that’s bad for her.
A church group wants to support the local hospital by making blankets that they weren’t asked to bring.
A supervisor—who’s worried about her employee getting fired—gives warning after warning to him for being ten minutes late every day.
A neighbor brings a meal that some of the family can’t eat due to food allergies.
A school district buys thousands of laptops for its elementary schools, and the laptops sit unused by the kids.
A mentor keeps sending networking opportunities to a protégé who is struggling with imposter syndrome.
A grandson eagerly sets up smart lights for his grandma, but she finds the technology overwhelming.
A coworker avoids bringing up the death of a colleague’s mom to avoid making them feel bad.
A friend who loves dancing keeps inviting an introvert to a club.
A company implements a wellness program to reduce stress, but employees need flexible work hours to manage needs at home.

These examples all show an intent to help, but with an attempt that misses the mark. All of us are prone to mistakes like this. The problem isn’t lack of interest, or neglecting a responsibility, or thinking about ourselves. The problem is focusing on the wrong thing.

What should be our focus instead? I think the right idea is to fix our gaze on something much bigger than our first thought. We ought instead to think about how people flourish. Starting there will give us better ideas of how to help.

In the next article (coming soon), we'll learn something more about human flourishing and what it can teach us.

In the meantime, think about times that you've given the wrong kind of help. Why did you? I'd love to hear from you in a comment on this article or in an email. Thank you for your thoughts!