Help (S2E1)

No one is an island, and other fun facts about life

Hi, and welcome to season 2 of this newsletter. This season, which will last as long as I have ideas that fit it, focuses on forgetting what things mean so you can enjoy what they are. The first season was a bit of a mishmash as I tried to figure out what I wanted to write about. I think these ones worked:

The one about my dad making sandwiches.

The one about giving more when you have more.

The one about my aunt’s funeral.

The one about passive income for your soul.

The one about things that aren’t wrong.

I wrote 51 newsletters in the first 3 years and… 3 in 2023. I just checked. 3! That’s not many. So maybe there will now be more. Ok, that’s all for this bit. Onto the new season.

Oh, and I’m doing another travel newsletter. You can find it here. It’ll be different from the first one, except that it’s still me and for half of it I’ll be in Japan again. Ok, that’s it now.

Thanks for reading.

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Dear Q,

There’s the need for help and there’s asking for help, and life would be a lot simpler if they happened at the same time.

Imagine if the moment you needed help it was telegraphed to the world. Does that idea make you feel insane? It makes me feel insane, right until I remember someone would probably come along and help me.

I think about those videos where groups of strangers mobilize to steady an errant rollercoaster, or move an entire subway train off someone’s leg. You don’t need to watch them to know what happens. People were visibly in trouble, and some other people helped.

When the need is clear, most people help.

I was walking out of a London tube station with a coworker, and a man at the top of the stairs asked for change. I had a fiver (what Brits call a 5 pound note) in my pocket, so I handed it to him. That was the extent of my thought process—money in pocket, hand money to person. Cash has basically disappeared from my day-to-day existence, so it was 50% altruism and 50% novelty.

Once we were past my coworker leaned over and said, “You know they make like £600 a day right?”

I did not know that people asking for change in the London Underground made upwards of £600 a day, and I didn’t know that because it isn’t true. It’s so not true it took me a minute to work out what they’d told me. And then I had to walk them through some maths (what Brits call math) to demonstrate how that couldn’t be true, not even a little.

If you’ve ever a) needed money and b) asked someone for it you’ll know c) this is the last thing anyone wants to do. It’s the worst because we’re told, basically from the jump, that the goal of existence is self-sufficiency. Even though this isn’t at all how life works in any way.

Self-made human. Like you birthed the baby you out of your own body.

You’ll hear this lunatic attitude during discussions of student debt relief. They should have to manage on their own, just like me. As if a loan, by its very existence, isn’t a declaration of not managing on one’s own.

We tend to treat mortgages and loans and government grants as part of the proper functioning of society, and money from a family member or friend as a kind of failure or nepo-baby benefit scheme. This attitude feels fundamentally broken.

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Ben Franklin coined the Franklin Effect, the idea that if you get someone to help you they will like you more, because they will reason, “I must like that person, or why would I have helped them?” But to me this feels like only half the story. In asking for help you are forced to show up in your humanity. You are giving people a way into your world.

Kindnesses by James Mitchell

In 2018 I spent 4 months in London, unemployed. London is a terrible city to be unemployed, and a terribler place to have done very little proper adulting. I was 42 and very unprepared. The first month was a joy, as I was still being paid by my previous job. And the next month. Month three was a bit stressy.

And then came month four. Faced with no way to pay my rent I asked my partner if she could help me.

At this point in my life, I was used to asking for money. A friend helped pay for a trip to Hong Kong. A boss lent me £500, no questions asked. Mitigating any shame I might feel at needing to ask was knowing I was a person people would lend money to. That had to be worth something, I thought.

Of course, it’s very different to ask for help when you know people can help you, nevermind want to help you. Would I feel the same way in a world where help wasn’t forthcoming? Almost certainly not. Which is to say, the world most people are in who are publicly asking for help.

As part of an experiment a few years ago I started to offer help to people before they had to ask, or overtly indicated help would be useful, or…uh… I could even say with complete certainty they wanted help.

Somehow, through no plan and barely any (more) effort of my own I’d found my situation transformed from one of needing help to being able to offer it. No one was more surprised than I was. (This was literally true, as no one seemed even a little surprised, which I guess says a lot about how we see ourselves versus how other people see us ha ha ha. Er… ha.)

Offering help was roughly eleventy billion times harder than asking for it.

Six months passed between having the idea and making the first offer, and it was tortuous. I vibrated between thinking it was A Very Bad Idea and the Greatest Idea Of All Time. Whenever I become too convinced either way I’m automatically suspicious, and here I was pinballing around my potential for altruism. I kept hearing the voice of [REDACTED COMEDIAN] talking about his “believies”.

“I never do any of them. I think about doing them, a lot. They make me feel good. Mmmmm.”

So I offered help, finally, and it was received. I overexplained and mostly wanted to disappear in a puff of smoke. If that seems wildly self-centered for a helpful gesture, it was! Which made me want to disappear even more.

But they said yes, and then the next person said yes, and eventually it felt less weird and conscious and more natural and appropriate. It isn’t always money, although money is the hardest one. Sometimes it’s a skill, like proofreading. Occasionally it’s physical, like walking a dog.

Have you ever known someone who could make every situation into a dancing situation? (If you don’t like dancing, subsitute for something you do like. But also, dancing! Dancing will be the topic of a future newsletter.) You start to believe dancing will happen because that person is there. After awhile, the world just seems like a place where dancing is the default state.

Movies make these people seem like magic forest elves (if you see Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Michael Cera you’re in the right place).

And what my dumb, overly simplistic, back of a napkin model United Nations ass started thinking was - if help always seemed available, more people would ask for it. Need is constant, but only overt need gets met (and usually not even that but… god. Ok.)

Guess now is the time in this newsletter where we find out if the entire premise even works.

(Gaaaaaaah. Right.)

I’ve often thought that people wanting to do bad things (say, pollute a waterway) have an outsized impact to people wanting to do good (clean even a section of waterway). Part of that is truly good deeds are generally quiet and, if not hidden, not trumpeted about.

We think of people needing help as the exception to an otherwise “stable life”. I think needing help is the default, and the big difference is in how closely help follows the need. If you need help moving and know you have 12 people who will happily assist you, your need is quiet to the point of absence. The help feels like an extension of good choices as evidenced by good people.

But need is the default, and help the exception because it’s hard to express need. When I started offering help I became more aware of how many things I needed, and the way those needs had been filled through luck and happenstance. I have the parents I have so I can’t know what it’s like not to have them, or not to make the choices I’ve made because of them. There’s a version of me who never goes to law school, never moves to London, never emerges from the dark edges of my reality.

In that context, even the mistakes I’ve made (of which I’ve made many) feel like privileges. I was allowed to make mistakes. They didn’t destroy anything.

So how do we enjoy asking for help? By recognizing need. How do we recognize need? By helping other people. What’s the best Radiohead album? Kid A. If you’re under 35? In Rainbows.¹

The other day I asked a friend for their thoughts on something. I didn’t particularly want their thoughts, nor did I think they’d be useful. This is why I asked. I knew that feeling was predicated on some wrong thinking, and I also knew by asking them for help I’d change the dynamic of our situation. To bastardize a quote from the terrible movie Paris, je t’aime, by acting like a person who needed help I became a person who needed help.

And I did need help, just not in the way I asked. I needed help reformatting our relationship. Talking about it seemed both fraught with pitfalls and completely crazy. Talk about… friendship? (Friendship is a future newsletter topic ok I’ll stop.)

Instead I articulated a need, not the need I felt but a different need. I asked for help peripherally, but the thing with help is it expands. It abhors a vacuum? It’s like (Bruce Lee voice) water, flowing and filling in whatever gaps are there. Their help went where it needed to go, and things changed for the better.

So this episode’s challenge is - ask someone for help. Someone you normally wouldn’t or haven’t asked to help you. How does it change how you feel about them?

See you mid-March.

T

1. That’s some help you didn’t know you needed.