Good person

First of all, don’t get me wrong.

There are several points where you could get me wrong. I’ll try to explain them in my best capacity. I do, however, appeal to your most inclined reader mode here.

This is not a defense of good people.

It’s neither an attack on goodness. I totally want to think of myself as a good person (who doesn’t?), and I believe this trait seriously struggles with standing out in today’s world, so it is crucial to exaggerate in supporting it.

That is precisely why we should take it more seriously and address it to the best of our knowledge.

The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to find out what is not counting as being a good person, what is unnecessarily connected by association to that trait, and should be separated from it if we wont to be the change we want to see in the world.

Sacrifice

There is this extremely harmful conviction that good people sacrifice themselves for others.

Sacrifice might come in many forms.

Not taking care of yourself and spending all your time on taking care of others counts as that.

People believe in some sort of martyrs approach towards goodness. But was this predominately is self-harm more than anything else. So if you recognize yourself among the sacrificers, it’s probably time to reconsider your goals and intentions.

Understanding different perspectives

As I’ve written above, most people like to consider themselves to be good. Which is definitely always correct if you look at them from the right perspective.

An old Jewish saying goes like this:

An enemy is a person whose story you haven’t heard yet.

Saying appeals to human empathy and the ability to connect with a stranger. It means

So everyone’s story you know is a good person?

Probably not, but it will make understanding and empathizing with them easier.

What you can learn from someone’s story is everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that is what makes the person relatable. Not just the good in them. The everything else.

We all have everything else. It is the attitude with which we address the bad and the ugly parts that make the difference.

Identity

Not addressing the bad and the ugly is problematic.

Trusting in goodness alone is naive at best.

Ignoring other parts of your personality that aren’t so flattering makes you deny them. Even pushing them aside, which makes them unable to address them or handle them inappropriate way. It could cause some problems, especially in the psychological field.

Trying to push the unwanted traits of your personality aside probably means that you want to be good by all means. Making you want to identify with being right.

Struggling to be good is great. But that means knowing yourself very well. Blindly ignoring everything that doesn’t fall in the “goodness” basket will short handendly make you feel as you want to. But it will probably fail in the long run.

Convictions about some noble traits are often mixed. Trying to make them as clear as possible makes them easier to pursue.

I consider this to be a sort of talk with yourself. Defining your goal and revaluing what this will take and what this means as thoroughly as you possibly can will make things more doable.

If possible, find help from someone else. It is likely that talking to yourself, you won’t be thorough enough since you know all your arguments already. You need a reliable BS stopper on the other side. A good friend will do.