Today’s topic was a thought inspired by an event from two days ago. If you haven’t been following my Dayre, Shorty got into a car accident yesterday. You can read it here or to keep a long story short I’ll just summarize it in points.
– Taxi driver hits Shorty in the back.
– Taxi driver tried to intimidate Shorty to paying him even though he was the one who knocked her from the back.
– I came and saw that the bully was an old man. I sympathized with him so I decided to help him out. Paid him RM150 even though he wanted RM600-800. I paid him just to help him out because I felt bad for him.
– Some people felt I shouldn’t have helped this bully. And that he was trying to swindle us.
I did receive one comment though that said it’s okay that I went easy on him and chose to help. Because good things happen to good people… or well that’s karma.
So that inspired my article today. Karma.
Note that I refer to Karma here not in the Buddhist or religious standpoint. I refer to Karma really as the general belief many of us have that good things will happen to people who do good things and bad things will happen to people who do bad things. And I’m talking about these things happening in this life… not another life or an afterlife.
I was brought up to believe in karma. That people who do good things have good things happen to them and people who do bad things have bad things happen to them. For a while I did believe in it and I admit that helped motivate me to do more good things whether it’s just helping a friend or do charity. In that way I have to say that even the most “altruistic” good thing I did then wasn’t truly purely “altruistic”.
Today though I don’t believe in karma. Here’s why:
1) People you help often don’t remember or appreciate it
Remember a story that goes something like this.
– A poor boy was looking for food.
– A grocer who saw him decided to help him out and gave it to him for free.
– Many years later the grocer fell sick and had to pay a big hospital bill.
– But the bills were paid in full by the doctor, who happened to be the boy who he gave food to many years ago.
They even made it into a viral Thai commercial.
Well in actual fact, that story never happened as you an see from this Snopes article.
The truth is in real life, most people don’t remember the good that you have done for them. In fact to some extent we’re wired in a way that makes us remember bad things that people do more than good things.
So if even the people you help most likely don’t remember what you did to help… how can they one day want to do something nice for you in return? If you’re helping someone with the hope and expectation that that person will repay you some day… odds are your return of investment is going to be zero.
So we’re really only left with “luck” or “coincidence” or the presence of some greater karmic power that will reward good people. That’s really hard to see.
2) Society today don’t admire good people. They admire powerful or wealthy people.
I know people who spend a great number of years of their lives doing social work. Really committing their lives to helping other people and many if not all of them go unrecognized by society. One of the people we’ve had in history that is most famous for being a good person and helping many others is Mother Teresa. That’s one. We haven’t had many more people in our generation that are known because they simply do good things.
In contrast Steve Jobs is one of the most admired entrepreneurs of our time. If it weren’t for him, we would possibly still be using Blackberries today with their cursed error messages that nobody could ever understand.
Still he wasn’t necessarily a “good” person in the way society deems a good person. When he joined Apple he shut down all the charity programs Apple was involved in and never restarted it (until Tim Cook finally took over). He also got his girlfriend pregnant and then refused to accept that the child was his until much later on.
And well there’s a whole other article here about how he was a bit of a jerk.
But modern society doesn’t care about all that. It’s because we don’t care about good people. We care about successful people regardless of how they are as a person or whether they’re good or bad.
3) The Bad Get Away with Being Bad
This happens way too often all over the world. Throughout history there were dictators or leaders who were responsible for some of the worst atrocities. Many got away with them easy. Some like Pol Pot lived on till the end and some like Hitler ended things in his own terms.
Bad people get away with it. So if there really is karma… then why do they?
The thing about realizing that I don’t believe in Karma is that I live a happier life. Why?
1) I have no expectations in getting something back in return when I do something nice for someone. So that means I get disappointed much less.
2) I realize that we all need to be good not because of the potential rewards we might get for being good. But because the world needs goodness… and if everyone is good to each other then maybe the world becomes a better place to live.
3) I don’t get frustrated when bad people get away with doing bad things because I understand that’s how life works.
I don’t believe in karma now… but I would like to believe in the goodness of people.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space