Photo by René C. Nielsen via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Maybe people don’t like to do good because they haven’t gotten bored with being bad?
I had this thought while listening to an episode of This American Life called, Superpowers. In one of the stories a researcher spent months going to bars and asking patrons which superpower they would like to have and why.
Most people either answered that they would like to fly or that they would like to be invisible.
As the research continued, he discovered that while some people claimed they wanted to fly or to be invisible for the sake of doing good, in actuality… when they were totally honest… they wanted to use their superpower to do things that were naughty. And while flying sounded kind of fun, they really just wanted to be invisible so they could see people naked or steal stuff.
That’s when I started to wonder: “Maybe people with superpowers do good stuff in the world simply because they’ve gotten bored with being bad?”
Think about it. The question Barbara Walters always asks a celebrity doing good in the world is always along the same line of reasoning. “Bill, you are the richest man in the world. Why did are you giving it all away?”
And the answer is a meme. (Poor people like us, we love to hear the meme.) “Well Barbara, you can only own so many houses and meet so many famous people before you realize that there must be something else more meaningful in the world.”
Tiger Woods isn’t the first and he won’t be the last suddenly wealthy person to buy a yacht called Privacy and line up 10-20 women.
You don’t wake up thinking “I’m bored with this life, I need to commit to doing really good stuff from now on” until you hit rock bottom. You discover that only when your wife shows you a drawer full of Maserati keys. Or you wake up on your bathroom floor surrounded by a bowl of chocolate covered baby sea turtles you didn’t finish, Ben Affleck passed out next to you, a half a pound of cocaine, and a random baby in your closet.
The first thing you do with newfound wealth is never give back. It’s always consume, consume, consume. And the epiphany comes when you took it too far.
Back to my reality
Photo by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos via Flickr (Creative Commons)
When I think about my own life, my own free time, and the people in my life… each day we are faced with a similar choice. With the time I have available, will I do something productive for society or will I do some consumptive?
Do I volunteer more hours serving the people of my church?
Do I go play golf?
Do I go on a kick-butt vacation?
Do I go on a mission trip?
Do I attend a charity fundraiser?
Do I buy a big plasma TV?
In the end, given the choice, I do some good in the world and I do some bad. (Not that those things above are horrible or anything. But you get the idea.) But if I’m honest about my motivation for doing either of the things above… it’s more often about mood than principle.
At the same time, as a leader, I’m often in a position of trying to motivate people to do something for good. And sometimes we are left scratching our heads and wondering, “Why aren’t people busy doing good?”
Maybe the answer is simple. Maybe they aren’t busy doing good because they haven’t gotten bored being bad?
I love Ira Glass and his show, This American Life. The love affair goes back to early marriage days when Kristen and I would play “right or left” in the car Saturday mornings. Back in 1998-1999 gas was less than a dollar per gallon and I was off every Saturday morning.
We’d get up early, head out for a nice breakfast, then get in the car and start driving. Any time we’d come to an intersection I’d ask Kristen… “Right or left?” Sometimes we’d end up way up in Wisconsin, sometimes in Central Illinois, sometimes in Michigan or Indiana, or sometimes we’d just explore suburbs of Chicago. Anything that interested us was an excuse to stop and smell the roses. Those adventures in our early marriage were some of the happiest days of our lives.
And Ira Glass was a part of those rides. We love listening to NPR and right around lunch This American Life would capture our attention as we explored. When we left Chicago in 2001 we kind of lost track of the show. Then about a year ago I found out that the show was the #1 podcast on iTunes and happily subscribed.
I love the pace of the stories. I love the segments. I love the way he tells stories. I love his voice. All of This American Life is why I happily label it one of my favorite things.
I love Ira Glass and his show,