Early yesterday morning, someone told me that I was a nice person because I had moved my cell phone and some other things from an empty chair next to me in a hospital emergency room. That person was simply waiting for someone, and there were many other empty chairs also. Me freeing up one more chair for that other person to choose from was the same as performing a voluntary action which was in turn considered a nice action in that person’s view.

Later last night, while entering a movie theatre, I noticed one of the people ahead of me not keep the theatre door open for people behind him as he walked in. The person after him said loudly “At least keep the door open out of niceness“, implying that the first person’s inability for any reason to offer voluntary help was considered a bad thing. That got me wondering more about a slowly growing trend that I have been noticing for a very long time. Is offering help in non-critical situations an obligation?

What do I mean by helping others in non-critical things?

In my life, I deal with many life threatening situations regularly, as some of you from the offline world may already know. For this article, I would like to focus solely on non-critical situations, situations where without any help no real harm, other than a few things like someone getting upset because of someone else not being courteous enough to offer help. For example, I am referring to situations where help is considered voluntary when it is offered, like opening the door for someone as a courtesy; I am not referring to situations where not helping someone can result in someone losing a life or have their life damaged in some manner.

Helping others voluntarily is considered a nice habit. Why then is not helping voluntarily in a non-critical situation considered a bad thing?

Why is it that when you offer help to someone voluntarily, it is sometimes appreciated by others, but when you do not offer help, you are looked down upon by many people? Anytime I help someone, I think about it. I wonder why I am helping, as I do not like helping out of obligation to anyone else. Obligation to society? Obligation to religion? Obligation to others? No, no and no. I am obligated to values, and I like to be obligated to those values that I realize are important because of my understanding and experience of and in life. As I wrote before, I can remember many times when I helped someone and I did not feel happy at all, and some of the responses I got from others shed some more light on the topic.

If we help others because we feel it is voluntary and we are doing something that we consider nice even though we are not obligated to, then our focus is probably on trying to see if others can benefit from our help. If we help others because we feel it is an obligation or because others may consider us to be rude if we do not help others, then our focus is probably on helping because it is an obligation.

Why is there usually no ground where there is no judgment passed on the behavior of a person who does not offer help to a stranger in a non-critical situation? Picking up a dropped pen for someone is nice and voluntary, but not picking it up on purpose is bad and rude. How can someone be innocent and selfless solely because they volunteer, when not volunteering results in many people in the society labeling that same person as being bad in some manner?

Is helping others in non-critical things an obligation?

Is the concept of helping supposed to exist because we can do it anytime we feel like it, or does it exist because others around us will consider it a nice gesture? What do you think?

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or opinion about this. Thank you.