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Ideas That Have Helped Mankind Summary and Analysis

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was a Nobel laureate British philosopher. In addition, he was a writer, logician, mathematician, historian, social critic and political activist. His genius mind had the capacity to write articles and essays on formal topics such as “Ideas That Have Helped Mankind”. In most of his essays, he presented a philosophy of his own. In this essay too, he talks about philosophical ideas very impressively. He refers to those goals which are not only helpful for his own nation but also for other nations of the world.

His philosophy is not limited to any religion. In fact, he ignores every religion and raised his voice for the welfare of whole humanity. Thus, there is an element of universality in his work. Many of his essays are suggestive in nature. In his essays, he gives the best piece of advice and compels the world through reasonable arguments to follow it for the sake of peace.

Summary and critical analysis of ideas that have helped mankind, ideas related to knowledge and technique, ideas related to morals, politics and science that have helped mankind, bertrand russell’s criticism, russell’s suggestions, russell’s idea of international government.

This essay is not different from other essays of the writer. Bertrand Russell thinks that there are some ideas that have helped mankind and they are worth mentioning. He does not only talk about their benefits but also appreciates their importance. These ideas have helped humanity and are still helping.

Bertrand Russell knows that the people of the Greeks were educated. He remembers their hard work. He is of the view that their efforts did not go to waste. At the time of the Renaissance, it was the literature of the Greeks and their ideas that helped not only writers but the whole of mankind. Some ideas are scientific, some are related to politics whereas the remaining are based on math, philosophy and logic.

Prehistoric Ideas that have Helped Mankind

Pre-historic age was the age of knowledge and technique. In those days, technical ideas have come into the minds of people, which helped mankind and increased their knowledge. Those ideas were not only helpful for them but also for the upcoming generations. It is not wrong to say that those ideas are the need of the hour. Those innovative ideas are much helpful for the modern world.

Bertrand Russell creates a list of those ideas that are related to knowledge and technique. These ideas changed the lifestyle of humankind.

Evolution of Language

Language helped humanity in many ways. Strong communication is only possible through language whether it is verbal or physical. It is the only language, through which people are transmitting information, gaining knowledge, and expressing their feelings and emotions. It is also a cultural identity for many nations. Thus, the idea of the evolution of language has definitely helped mankind.

Discovery of Fire and its Use

Fire is, indeed, one of the best innovations in the world. It is helping people in many ways. Though it has many drawbacks as nations are using it as weapons, it is helpful, if used for positive purposes. It is a source of warmth and comfort. Moreover, cooking, electricity and all type of machines are dependent on fire. So, in one way or the other, the ideas of fire and its uses have helped mankind and are still helping them.

Art of Writing

Writing was the first way of distant communication. The idea of writing helped people in communicating, learning and gaining knowledge. It has also helped people store information related to history. If Greek literature is read even today then it is possible only because of “writing invention”.

Domestication of Animals

Animals were not the source of pleasure before taming. They were harming people and the only way to survive along with animals was to domesticate them. No doubt, the ideas related to taming of animals have also helped mankind.

Agricultural Inventions

With the passage of time, people realized that hard work was not enough; therefore, smart work was necessary. Many agricultural inventions helped people in producing more crops while doing less hard work.

Historical Ideas

In historic times, people made progress in the field of mathematics, astronomy and science. Although the term “astronomy” appeared in historic times yet Bertrand Russell is of the view that Greeks predefined astronomy and mathematics; therefore, their role in defining important scientific terms helped humankind; especially during the period of the Renaissance. Hence, these ideas belonged to pre-historic times but they were enhanced in historic times; therefore, they are included in the second category.

In addition, Bertrand Russell talks about morality, politics and science in this essay. He knows the importance of knowledge; therefore, he promotes ideas related to it.

Law of Inertia by Galileo

The law of inertia is the base of modern scientific inventions. Newton has presented three laws of motion but they are based on the law of inertia. In Russell’s eyes, this law is much helpful and laid the foundation of modern physics.

Laws of Motion (Newton’s)

The science of motion is the base of physics. Newton presented three laws of motion due to which, physics remembers him even today. Bertrand Russell may consider it an idea but it is a pure effort of Newton to demonstrate these laws. Obviously, these laws/ideas have helped mankind.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Darwin’s theory of evolution shocked many religious scholars. A number of scientists believe that this theory is fictional. However, Russell sees it as a greater achievement in the field of science.

Psychology (The Science of Behavior and Mind)

Science proved that there is no concept of the soul in the human body and it functions on the basis of some principles. Similarly, animals, birds and other living creatures behave under various circumstances. Bertrand Russell considers that the science of behaviour and mind is also one of the cooperative ideas that have helped mankind.

Moral Principles

Many nations created weapons for the sake of security but unfortunately, they used them against each other. Weapons destroyed first humanity and then humans. Man is a mixture of both good and evil. In order to ensure goodness and for the welfare of humanity, moral principles were created. Brotherhood and the doctrine of unity are important in this context. These ideas were necessary to save the world from destruction.

In history, this doctrine was adopted by Alexander the Great, who forced his fellowmen to marry women of different nations so as to create a single democratic nation. It is certainly a positive step and can be included in those better ideas that have helped and led mankind towards improvements and recreation.

Besides its negative aspects, people deem democracy as the best system. “Abraham Lincoln” once said: “democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It gives people liberty and freedom whether it is religious or cultural. It also provides people with the freedom of speech. In Russell’s eyes, it is also one of the best ideas that have helped people along with other ideas.

With democracy, there comes freedom. People can easily purchase properties. They can do business and can enjoy religious freedom. They are free to speak even against the government. Thus, with democracy, freedom is also important.

Personal Liberty

Freedom of the whole nation is not enough until one has the liberty to accomplish his desires. People can adopt their desired religion and culture. They can pray, worship or celebrate religious or cultural festivals. Bertrand Russell likes personal freedom along with the freedom of the nation.

Russell, on one hand, appreciates the ideas that have helped mankind but on the other hand, he criticizes the people who misuse them. For instance, he raises his voice against physical and moral corruption in democracy. He says that when a democratic country comes into power, it starts focusing on its private interests. Instead of doing something for the welfare of the motherland, people in power start promoting their private concerns. This misuse of power leads a nation towards destruction. The private interests of the people in power are fulfilled, subject to the risk and cost to the citizens. The writer considers that democracy is a safeguard against the worst abuses of power. People do not know what their selected persons are doing.

Russell is also against war and wants peace for every nation as well as religion. He wants equality for everyone. His criticism is related to the misuse of power, and corruption of government and laws.

At the end of the essay, Russell presents his own idea. He while demonstrating his own philosophy suggests that every country should adopt the doctrine of International Government. He supports his philosophy with subtle arguments and strong examples. The main suggestion of Bertrand Russell is for creating an International Government.

The writer thinks that humanity has suffered a lot in both world wars. Despite too much destruction, people gained nothing. If counties and nations want survival then the international government is the only option.

When Russell wrote this essay, he was confident that if the idea of international government is not adopted then in upcoming years, the war would destroy everything. The United States of America and Russia were two major powers in those days.

Notwithstanding, The world had not adopted the idea of international government and fortunately, nothing happened.

In his suggestions, the writer talks about equality. He may be right but it is much more difficult to adopt his idea of International Government. Although International Government can fight against hunger and disease, yet many countries do not want equality. This idea goes in favour of poor countries, and rich countries do not want equality. They want more and more power. Moreover, in Russell’s days, only U.S.A and U.S.S.R were in power but nowadays China is also an established country. Thus, there is a boost in opposition.

Bertrand Russell in this essay first describes the benefits of useful ideas that have helped mankind and at the end demonstrates his own philosophical idea of international government. Russell’s philosophy is the philosophy of peace and equality. He supports his arguments and philosophy with historical examples. He has a vast knowledge of every field of life, which makes him a Nobel laureate.

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Ideas that have Helped Mankind

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Ideas that have Helped Mankind by Bertrand Russel Summary & Analysis

Bertrand Russell is a well-known British philosopher and a symbolic character in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy. He is also known as a logician and social reformer, and a Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1950. He wrote numerous books and huge numbers of articles. His subject matters include social, political and moral issues. He is preeminently known as a promoter of peace.

Ideas that have Helped mankind is an expository essay in which Russell gives a detailed account of the ideas that have helped mankind in pre-historic time and historic time. This essay is one of Russell’s unpopular essays.

Russell begins the essay, Ideas that have Helped Mankind, by asking straight six questions that indispensable to outlining what would be supportive to mankind. The six questions are:

“Are mankind helped …….. friendly with one another?” (Russell)

Russell explains each one the question one after another in detail. The very first idea in pre-historic time which helped man, according to the author, is the increase in numbers. There is a time when men were a rare species on the planet. They were afraid of giant beasts; along with difficulty in sustenance. The increase in numbers benefited them a lot in terms of safety.

Early humans were more like animals living like beasts: cloth less, and obtaining food by killing other animals. However, with the passage of time, their way of living changes and they become less like animals . The two factors that bring about this change are the “congenital skills” and the “forethought” (thinking about the future). The fact, nevertheless, is that it is not because of the congenital skills that human progress but because of acquired skills.

The author is not sure about the in what way happiness benefited the mankind. Though the foresightedness of man helped them in many ways; it has harmed them in an equal manner. The man is always in fear of upcoming disasters, and this fear of the future make them less happy, says the writer. According to Russell, facing the calamity is not that much lethal as worrying about it is.

A man is more exposed to various experiences in their life than animals. This all because of different intellect from other species of its kind. Their brainpower, consequently, empowers them to enjoy a greater diversity of experiences.

The increase in knowledge with the passage of time helped the man to progress. It is on the basis of the amount of knowledge that humans are superior to other species.

Russell, furthermore, point out toward how the development of civilization has helped mankind throughout evolution. To him, the civilization told the human to be more kind towards other fellow beings as compared to animals. A sense of love, care and helped aroused in the man with the development of civilization and this benefited the man in term of progress.

Apart from these above-mentioned elements, Russell points out ideas during the pre-historic time and the historic time that have helped mankind.

Pre-historic Time ideas:

Ideas that have helped mankind during pre-historic time are as follows.

The invention of language is the most important as well as difficult step. The exact stage during which language developed is not known, however, without language it would be impossible for any generation to develop.
The second step is the utilization of fire . With the help of fire humans and other animals keep themselves warm and cook food.
Another great step was taming of domestic animals which provide food and nutrition to man.
Along with the domestication of animals, the human need for green vegetables leads to the invention of This invention was not easy as it involves the huge sacrifice of humans.
The last but not the least is the development of the art of writing. It is, too, like writing developed gradually. First pictures and signs were used to convey a message. However, with the passage of time alphabets evolved.

Historic Time ideas:

Russell continues to contemplate the development accomplished by men in historic times. He splits the ideas into two types: ideas about knowledge and technique and the ideas that are concerned with morals and politics.

Development In Mathematics and Astronomy:

In Babylonia, in ancient times, the important steps about mathematics and astronomy were taken by Greeks. They acquire knowledge from the civilized nations like Egyptians. Whatever were offered by Egyptians were immediately assimilated by Greeks. The Greeks used mathematics, not in the way it is used nowadays. They used it for pleasure and luxury, not for business. Greeks also made huge progress in astronomy as well but there was no practical application of astronomy until it becomes associated with astrology. Archimedes and Aristarchus of Samos are one of the greatest mathematician and astronomer of the antiquity, respectively. The Greeks developed the custom of communicating natural laws in mathematical terms.

Beneficial Ideas Contributed during 17 th Century by Scientists.

During the 17 th century, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz are the most prominent figures who made huge developments. All modern scientific discoveries, with the exception of an atomic bomb, are based on old classical principles of Galileo and Newton. The undercurrents of Galileo and Newton rest upon two new principles and a new technique. One of the principles is the law of inertia which states that every body continues its state of rest or uniform motion unless a force is applied on it.

The science of the 17 th century made it clear that if we wish to understand the universe; we should deal with nature without any biasness.

The Theory of Evolution:

Geology and the Darwin theory of evolution put a real blow on the face of severe conventional religious belief about the evolution of mankind. Russell says that science proves the soul to be useless. He is not sure whether a person has a soul or not, however, if it exists it has no role.

The Moral and Political Ideas:

According to Russell, moral and political ideas belongs to the second class of historic ideas that have helped mankind. The progress in science and technology, according to Russell, possibly will merely upsurge the extent of the calamity that an exploitation of ability can bring about. For example, the clash between Muslims and Jews for the control of Palestine, due to political bigotry, can cause the world war and by the use of an atomic weapon; they will destroy the whole world. Russell gives a sound, justified warning to the mankind. As far as knowledge and technology is concerned, humans have developed a lot in this field. However, when we speak of morality particularly political morality, no such development is made. There is unconditionally on no account any sensation in any sector of the world population of the unity of menfolk; the humans are divided into varied groups and communities, and every community thinks itself more vital as compare to others. The ideas of nationalism were not that widespread and strong as it is now and it narrows the mentality of man. The realm of the world proposes the vision of a dynasty alienated against itself. An objective of a world-government is by way of inaccessible from the thoughts of individuals as the far planets in the solar system. The mankind must dedicate some concerns towards moral and political development, if it has to survive.

The Idea of Comradeship of Man:

Amongst the philosophies that have benefited men in the moral domain is the idea of the comradeship of humans. This idea owed its major power to a certain political progress. This idea was invented by the Stoics. This idea was reinforced by Buddhism and Christianity, consequently. Christianity played a huge role in lessening the miseries of the slaves. They established hospitals and charity schools on a broad scale. Still, a huge figure of Christians is unsuccessful to dwell up to the principles that are promoted by their conviction.

The idea of brotherhood among humans is among the important ideas that have benefited the moral development of mankind, however, to some people this idea still doesn’t hold upon some minds. This is because of the wide diversity among people that resulted in nations. We approve Russell concept of the brotherhood that it helped a lot in development of mankind, yet is not capable of preventing world wars.

The Idea of Democracy and Liberty:

The concepts of equality, fraternity, and liberty have helped mankind to a large extent. The roots of all these concepts lie in religion. Religious toleration provides a platform for individual liberty to enter into practical politics. John Locke is considered one of the supreme supporter of liberty in the 17 th century. He tried his best to settle the individual liberty with constitutional control. Law and government are other extraordinary concepts in the politics that have helped mankind. The Government, of the two, is more important. The Government can be well-defined by means of the combined force of a public. It is a force which enables the control of citizens and to struggle against the pressure from overseas States. In order to maintain peace in a state of war or when there is a danger of war, the government seems to have greater control over private citizens. At the charge of citizens, governments intensify their power. In the early times, the kings had misused this political powers but nowadays, there is a complete check on government which doesn’t allow the government to misuse this power. This is achieved through democracy. In democracy, government is run on the desire of people. In addition to, in democratic states, the constitution allows freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of movement. A democratic State distinguishes from a police State where individuals are controlled by governments and there is no freedom.

Government:

Russell has progressive views about government. The approach that he adopted to discuss government is quite pragmatic. Those who are hard-edge socialist will never agree with Russell’s ideas of liberty and democracy. According to Russell, democracy offers the freedom that is very essential for the welfare and bliss of mankind. While on the other hand, a totalitarian system of government takes all over into their hands and treat the people as their subjects. No country can develop morally and on scientific grounds in such a system.

Russell finally proposes an idea that may benefit the mankind to a great extent in the coming future. The idea is of one single government for the whole world. To Russell, the upcoming time for mankind would be gloomy if the idea or single government is not put into practice. According to Russell, nowadays world faces unprecedented problems, and human are left with only two substitutes: one is that man should go back ancient times as a consequence of obliteration of civilization or they should agree upon establishing a single international government. A new period of development and progress of mankind with start in case a new international government is formed. The United States and the Soviet Unions, nowadays, are considered to be truly independent states. A big step, for the welfare of mankind, on the mutual agreement, to convert two independent states to one, should be taken for establishing peace in the world.

Previously Russell seems to determine about the idea of international government. But now to him, the idea seems to be wholly impractical. The world is divided into more than one hundred and fifty states and each state have their own identity. The unity and agreement on a large scale of international government are questionable. Even if we only consider the two independent states; would they agree to form one international government?

According to Russell, when he wrote this essay, the world in coming twenty to thirty years will either abolish itself or will establish by establishing an international government. Neither of his prediction comes true. Peace still prevails in the world and in the future there would be no need of establishing world-government.

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Ideas That Have Helped Mankind

By bertrand russell, from "unpopular essays".

Before we can discuss this subject we must form some conception as to the kind of effect that we consider a help to mankind. Are mankind helped when they become more numerous? Or when they become less like animals? Or when they become happier? Or when they learn to enjoy a greater diversity of experiences? Or when they come to know more? Or when they become more friendly to one another? I think all these things come into our conception of what helps mankind, and I will say a preliminary word about them.

The most indubitable respect in which ideas have helped mankind is numbers. There must have been a time when homo sapiens was a very rare species, subsisting precariously in jungles and caves, terrified of wild beasts, having difficulty in securing nourishment. At this period the biological advantage of his greater intelligence, which was cumulative because it could be handed on from generation to generation, had scarcely begun to outweigh the disadvantages of his long infancy, his lessened agility as compared with monkeys, and his lack of hirsute protection against cold. In those days, the number of men must certainly have been very small. The main use to which, throughout the ages, men have put their technical skill has been to increase the total population. I do not mean that this was the intention, but that it was, in fact, the effect. If this is something to rejoice in, then we have occasion to rejoice.

We have also become, in certain respects, progressively less like animals. I can think in particular of two respects: first, that acquired, as opposed to congenital, skills play a continually increasing part in human life, and, secondly, that forethought more and more dominates impulse. In these respects we have certainly become progressively less like animals.

As to happiness, I am not so sure. Birds, it is true, die of hunger in large numbers during the winter, if they are not birds of passage. But during the summer they do not foresee this catastrophe, or remember how nearly it befell them in the previous winter. With human beings the matter is otherwise. I doubt whether the percentage of birds that will have died of hunger during the present winter (1946-7) is as great as the percentage of human beings that will have died from this cause in India and central Europe during the same period. But every human death by starvation is preceded by a long period of anxiety, and surrounded by the corresponding anxiety of neighbors. We suffer not only the evils that actually befall us, but all those that our intelligence tells us we have reason to fear. The curbing of impulses to which we are led by forethought averts physical disaster at the cost of worry, and general lack of joy. I do not think that the learned men of my acquaintance, even when they enjoy a secure income, are as happy as the mice that eat the crumbs from their tables while the erudite gentlemen snooze. In this respect, therefore, I am not convinced that there has been any progress at all.

As to diversity of enjoyments, however, the matter is otherwise. I remember reading an account of some lions who were taken to a movie showing the successful depredations of lions in a wild state, but none of them got any pleasure from the spectacle. Not only music, and poetry and science, but football and baseball and alcohol, afford no pleasure to animals. Our intelligence has, therefore, certainly enabled us to get a much greater variety of enjoyment than is open to animals, but we have purchased this advantage at the expense of a much greater liability to boredom.

But I shall be told that it is neither numbers nor multiplicity of pleasures that makes the glory of man. It is his intellectual and moral qualities. It is obvious that we know more than animals do, and it is common to consider this one of our advantages. Whether it is, in fact, an advantage, may be doubted. But at any rate it is something that distinguishes us from the brutes.

Has civilization taught us to be more friendly towards one another? The answer is easy. Robins (the English, not the American species) peck an elderly robin to death, whereas men (the English, not the American species) give an elderly man an oldage pension. Within the herd we are more friendly to each other than are many species of animals, but in our attitude towards those outside the herd, in spite of all that has been done by moralists and religious teachers, our emotions are as ferocious as those of any animal, and our intelligence enables us to give them a scope which is denied to even the most savage beast. It may be hoped, though not very confidently, that the more humane attitude will in time come to prevail, but so far the omens are not very propitious.

All these different elements must be borne in mind in considering what ideas have done most to help mankind. The ideas with which we shall be concerned may be broadly divided into two kinds: those that contribute to knowledge and technique, and those that are concerned with morals and politics. I will treat first those that have to do with knowledge and technique.

The most important and difficult steps were taken before the dawn of history. At what stage language began is not known, but we may be pretty certain that it began very gradually. Without it it would have been very difficult to hand on from generation to generation the inventions and discoveries that were gradually made.

Another great step, which may have come either before or after the beginning of language, was the utilization of fire. I suppose that at first fire was chiefly used to keep away wild beasts while our ancestors slept, but the warmth must have been found agreeable. Presumably on some occasion a child got scolded for throwing the meat into the fire, but when it was taken out it was found to be much better, and so the long history of cookery began.

The taming of domestic animals, especially the cow and the sheep, must have made life much pleasanter and more secure. Some anthropologists have an attractive theory that the utility of domestic animals was not foreseen, but that people attempted to tame whatever animal their religion taught them to worship. The tribes that worshiped lions and crocodiles died out, while those to whom the cow or the sheep was a sacred animal prospered. I like this theory, and in the entire absence of evidence, for or against it, I feel at liberty to play with it.

Even more important than the domestication of animals was the invention of agriculture, which, however, introduced bloodthirsty practices into religion that lasted for many centuries. Fertility rites tended to involve human sacrifice and cannibalism. Moloch would not help the corn to grow unless he was allowed to feast on the blood of children. A similar opinion was adopted by the Evangelicals of Manchester in the early days of industrialism, when they kept six-year-old children working twelve to fourteen hours a day, in conditions that caused most of them to die. It has now been discovered that grain will grow, and cotton goods can be manufactured, without being watered by the blood of infants. In the case of the grain, the discovery took thousands of years; in the case of the cotton goods hardly a century. So perhaps there is some evidence of progress in the world.

The last of the great pre-historic inventions was the art of writing, which was indeed a pre-requisite of history. Writing, like speech, developed gradually, and in the form of pictures designed to convey a message it was probably as old as speech, but from pictures to syllable writing and thence to the alphabet was a very slow evolution. In China the last step was never taken.

Coming to historic times, we find that the earliest important steps were taken in mathematics and astronomy, both of which began in Babylonia some millennia before the beginning of our era. Learning in Babylonia seems, however, to have become stereotyped and non-progressive, long before the Greeks first came into contact with it. It is to the Greeks that we owe ways of thinking and investigating that have ever since been found fruitful. In the prosperous Greek commercial cities, rich men living on slave labor were brought by the processes of trade into contact with many nations, some quite barbarous, others fairly civilized. What the civilized nations - the Babylonians and Egyptians - had to offer the Greeks quickly assimilated. They became critical of their own traditional customs, by perceiving them to be at once analogous to, and different from, the customs of surrounding inferior people, and so by the sixth century BC some of them achieved a degree of enlightened rationalism which cannot be surpassed in the present day. Xenophanes observed that men make gods in their own image - 'the Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair: Yes, and if oxen and lions and horses had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produced works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.'

Some Greeks used their emancipation from tradition in the pursuit of mathematics and astronomy, in both of which they made the most amazing progress. Mathematics was not used by the Greeks, as it is by the moderns, to facilitate industrial processes; it was a 'gentlemanly' pursuit, valued for its own sake as giving eternal truth, and a super-sensible standard by which the visible world was condemned as second-rate. Only Archimedes foreshadowed the modern use of mathematics by inventing engines of war for the defence of Syracuse against the Romans. A Roman soldier killed him and the mathematicians retired again into their ivory tower.

Astronomy, which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pursued with ardor, largely because of its usefulness in navigation, was pursued by the Greeks with no regard for practical utility, except when, in later antiquity, it became associated with astrology. At a very early stage they discovered the earth to be round and made a fairly accurate estimate of its size They discovered ways of calculating the distance of the sun and moon, and Aristarchus of Samos even evolved the complete Copernican hypothesis, but his views were rejected by all his followers except one, and after the third century BC no very important progress was made. At the time of the Renaissance, however, something of what the Greeks had done became known, and greatly facilitated the rise of modem science.

The Greeks had the conception of natural law, and acquired the habit of expressing natural laws in mathematical terms. These ideas have provided the key to a very great deal of the understanding of the physical world that has been achieved in modern times. But many of them, including Aristotle, were misled by a belief that science could make a fruitful use of the idea of purpose. Aristotle distinguished four kinds of cause, of which only two concern us, the 'efficient' cause and the 'final' cause. The 'efficient' cause is what we should call simply the cause. The 'final' cause is the purpose. For instance, if, in the course of a tramp in the mountains, you find an inn just when your thirst has become unendurable, the efficient cause of the inn is the actions of the bricklayers that built it, while its final cause is the satisfaction of your thirst. If someone were to ask 'why is there an inn there?' it would be equally appropriate to answer 'because someone had it built there' or 'because many thirsty travelers pass that way'. One is an explanation by the 'efficient' cause and the other by the 'final' cause. Where human affairs are concerned, the explanation by 'final' cause is often appropriate, since human actions have purposes. But where inanimate nature is concerned, only 'efficient' causes have been found scientifically discoverable, and the attempt to explain phenomena by 'final' causes has always led to bad science. There may, for ought we know, be a purpose in natural phenomena, but if so it has remained completely undiscovered, and all known scientific laws have to do only with 'efficient' causes. In this respect Aristotle led the world astray, and it did not recover fully until the time of Galileo.

The seventeenth century, especially Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, made an advance in our understanding of nature more sudden and surprising than any other in history, except that of the early Greeks. It is true that some of the concepts used in the mathematical physics of that time had not quite the validity that was then ascribed to them. It is true also that the more recent advances of physics often reuire new concepts quite different from those of the seventeenth century. Their concepts, in fact, were not the key to all e secrets of nature, but they were the key to a great many. Modern technique in industry and war, with the sole exception of the atomic bomb, is still wholly based upon a type of dynamics developed out of the principles of Galileo and Newton. Most of astronomy still rests upon these same principles, though there are some problems such as 'what keeps the sun hot?' in which the recent discoveries of quantum mechanics are essential. The dynamics of Galileo and Newton depended upon two new principles and a new technique.

The first of the new principles was the law of inertia, which stated that any body, left to itself, will continue to move as it is moving in the same straight line, and with the same velocity. The importance of this principle is only evident when it is contrasted with the principles that the scholastics had evolved out of Aristotle. Before Galileo it was held that there was a radical difference between regions below the moon and regions from the moon upwards. In the regions below the moon, the 'sublunary' sphere, there was change and decay; the 'natural' motion of bodies was rectilinear, but any body in motion, if left to itself, would gradually slow up and presently stop. From the moon upwards, on the contrary, the 'natural' motion of bodies was circular, or compounded of circular motions, and in the heavens there was no such thing as change or decay, except the periodic changes of the orbits of the heavenly bodies. The movements of the heavenly bodies were not spontaneous, but were passed on to them from the primum mobile, which was the outermost of the moving spheres, and itself derived its motion from the Unmoved Mover, i.e. God. No one thought of making any appeal to observation, for instance, it was taken that a projectile would first move horizontally for a while, and then suddenly begin to la vertically, although it might have been supposed that anybody watching the fountain could have seen the drops move in curves. Comets, since they appear and disappear, had to be supposed to be between the earth and the moon, for if they had been above the moon they would have had to be indestructible. It is evident that out of such a jumble nothing could be developed. Galileo unified the principles governing the earth and the heavens by his single law of inertia, according to which a body, once in motion, will not stop of itself, but will move with a constant velocity in a straight line whether it is on earth or in one of the celestial spheres. This principle made it possible to develop a science of the motions of matter, without taking account of any supposed influence of mind or spirit, and thus laid the foundations of the purely materialistic physics in which men of science, however pious, have ever since believed.

From the seventeenth century onwards, it has become increasingly evident that if we wish to understand natural laws, we must get rid of every kind of ethical and aesthetic bias. We must cease to think that noble things have noble causes, that intelligent things have intelligent causes, or that order is impossible without a celestial policeman. The Greeks admired the sun and moon and planets, and supposed them to be gods Plotinus explains how superior they are to human beings in wisdom and virtue. Anaxagoras, who taught otherwise, was prosecuted for impiety and compelled to fly from Athens The Greeks also allowed themselves to think that since the circle is the most perfect figure, the motions of the heavenly bodies must be, or be derived from circular motions. Every bias of this sort had to be discarded by seventeenth-century astronomy. The Copernican system showed that the earth is not the center of the universe, and suggested to a few bold spirits that perhaps man was not the supreme purpose of the Creator. In the main, however, astronomers were pious folk, and until the nineteenth century most of them, except in France, believed in Genesis.

It was geology, Darwin, and the doctrine of evolution, that first upset the faith of British men of science. If man was evolved by insensible gradations from lower forms of life, a number of things became very difficult to understand. At what moment in evolution did our ancestors acquire free will? At what stage in the long journey from the amoeba did they begin to have immortal souls? When did they first become capable of the kinds of wickedness that would justify a benevolent Creator in sending them into eternal torment? Most people felt that such punishment would be hard on monkeys, in spite of their propensity for throwing coconuts at the heads of Europeans. But how about Pithecanthropus Erectus? Was it really he who ate the apple? Or was it Homo Pekiniensis? Or was it perhaps the Piltdown man? I went to Piltdown once, but saw no evidence of special depravity in that village, nor did I see any signs of its having changed appreciably since pre-historic ages. Perhaps then it was the Neanderthal men who first sinned? This seems the more likely, as they lived in Germany. But obviously there can be no answer to such questions, and those theologians who do not wholly reject evolution have had to make profound readjustments.

One of the 'grand' conceptions which have proved scientifically useless is the soul. I do not mean that there is positive evidence showing that men have no souls; I only mean that the soul, if it exists, plays no part in any discoverable causal law. There are all kinds of experimental methods of determining how men and animals behave under various circumstances. You can put rats in mazes and men in barbed wire cages, and observe their methods of escape. You can administer drugs and observe their effect. You can turn a male rat into a female, though so far nothing analogous has been done with human beings, even at Buchenwald. It appears that socially undesirable conduct can be dealt with by medical means, or by creating a better environment, and the conception of sin has thus come to seem quite unscientific, except, of course, as applied to the Nazis. There is real hope that, by getting to understand the science of human behavior, governments may be even more able than they are at present to turn mankind into rabbles of mutually ferocious lunatics. Governments could, of course, do exactly the opposite and cause the human race to co-operate willingly and cheerfully in making themselves happy, rather than in making others miserable, but only if there is an international government with a monopoly of armed force. It is very doubtful whether this will take place.

This brings me to the second kind of idea that has helped or may in time help mankind; I mean moral as opposed to technical ideas. Hitherto I have been considering the in creased command over the forces of nature which men hay' derived from scientific knowledge, but this, although it is: pre-condition of many forms of progress, does not of itsel ensure anything desirable. On the contrary, the present state of the world and the fear of an atomic war show that scientific progress without a corresponding moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about. In superstitious moments I am tempted to believe in the myth of the Tower of Babel, and to suppose that in our own day a similar but greater impiety i about to be visited by a more tragic and terrible punishment Perhaps - so I sometimes allow myself to fancy - God does not intend us to understand the mechanism by which He regulates the material universe. Perhaps the nuclear physicists have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it time to bring their activities to a stop. And what simpler method could He devise than to let them carry their ingenuity to the point where they exterminate the human race? If I could think that deer and squirrels, nightingales and larks, would survive, I might view this catastrophe with some equanimity, since man has not shown himself worthy to be the lord of creation. But it is to be feared that the dreadful alchemy of the atomic bomb will destroy all forms of life equally, and that the earth will remain for ever a dead clod senselessly whirling round a futile sun. I do not know the immediate precipitating cause of this interesting occurrence. Perhaps it will be a dispute about Persian oil, perhaps a disagreement as to Chinese trade, perhaps a quarrel between Jews and Mohommedans for the control of Palestine. Any patriotic person can see that these issues are of such importance as to make the extermination of mankind preferable to cowardly conciliation.

In case, however, there should be some among my readers who would like to see the human race survive, it may be worth while considering the stock of moral ideas that great men have put into the world and that might, if they were listened to, secure happiness instead of misery for the mass of mankind.

Man, viewed morally, is a strange amalgam of angel and devil. He can feel the splendor of the night, the delicate beauty of spring flowers, the tender emotion of parental love, and the intoxication of intellectual understanding. In moments of insight visions come to him of how life should be lived and how men should order their dealings one with another. Universal love is an emotion which many have felt and which many more could feel if the world made it less difficult. This is one side of the picture. On the other side are cruelty, greed, indifference and over-weening pride. Men, quite ordinary men, will compel children to look on while their mothers are raped. In pursuit of political aims men will submit their opponents to long years of unspeakable anguish. We know what the Nazis did to Jews at Auschwitz. In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetuated by the Nazis. And how about our noble selves? We would not do such deeds, oh no! But we enjoy our juicy steaks and our hot rolls while German children die of hunger because our governments dare not face our indignation if they asked us to forgo some part of our pleasures. If these were a Last Judgment as Christians believe, how do you think our excuses would sound before that final tribunal?

Moral ideas sometimes wait upon political developments, and sometimes outrun them. The brotherhood of man is an ideal which owed its first force to political developments. When Alexander conquered the East he set to work to obliterate the distinction of Greek and barbarian, no doubt because his Greek and Macedonian army was too small to hold down so vast an empire by force. He compelled his officers to marry barbarian aristocratic ladies, while he himself, to set a doubly excellent example, married two barbarian princesses. As a result of this policy Greek pride and exclusiveness were diminished, and Greek culture spread to many regions not inhabited by Hellenic stock. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who was probably a boy at the time of Alexander's conquest, was a Phoenician, and few of the eminent Stoics were Greeks. It was the Stoics who invented the conception of the brotherhood of man. They taught that all men are children of Zeus and that the sage will ignore the distinctions of Greek and barbarian, bond and free. When Rome brought the whole civilised world under one government, the political environment was favorable to the spread of this doctrine. In a new form, more capable of appealing to the emotions of ordinary men and women, Christianity taught a similar doctrine. Christ said 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor thyself,' and when asked 'who is my neighbor?' went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by his hearers, you should substitute 'German' or 'Japanese' for 'Samaritan', I fear many present day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realise how far they have departed from the teaching of the Founder of their religion. A similar doctrine had been taught much earlier by the Buddhists. According to them, the Buddha declared that he could not be happy so long as even one man remained miserable. It might seem as if these lofty ethical teachings had little effect upon the world; in India Buddhism died out, in Europe Christianity was emptied of most of the elements it derived from Christ. But I think this would be a superficial view. Christianity, as soon as it conquered the State, put an end to gladiatorial shows, not because they were cruel, but because they were idolatrous. The result, however, was to diminish the widespread education in cruelty by which the populace of Roman towns were degraded. Christianity also did much to soften the lot of slaves. It established charity on a large scale, and inaugurated hospitals. Although the great majority of Christians failed lamentably in Christian charity, the ideal remained alive and in every age inspired some notable saints. In a new form, it passed over into modern Liberalism, and remains the inspiration of much that is most hopeful in our sombre world.

The watchwords of the French Revolution, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, have religious origins. Of Fraternity I have already spoken. Equality was a characteristic of the Orphic Societies in ancient Greece, from which, indirectly, a great deal of Christian dogma took its rise. In these Societies, slaves and women were admitted on equal terms with citizens. Plato's advocacy of Votes for Women, which has seemed surprising to some modern readers, is derived from Orphic practices. The Orphics believed in transmigration and thought that a soul which in one life inhabits the body of a slave, may, in another, inhabit that of a king. Viewed from the standpoint of religion, it is therefore foolish to discriminate between a slave and a king; both share the dignity belonging to an immortal soul, and neither, in religion, can claim anything more. This point of view passed over from Orphism into Stoicism, and into Christianity. For a long time its practical effect was small, but ultimately, whenever circumstances were favorable, it helped in bringing about the diminution of the inequalities in the social system. Read, for instance, John Woolman's Journal. John Woolman was a Quaker, one of the first Americans to oppose slavery. No doubt the real ground of his opposition was humane feeling, but he was able to fortify this feeling and to make it controversially more effective by appeals to Christian doctrines, which his neighbors did not dare to repudiate openly.

Liberty as an ideal has had a very chequered history. In antiquity, Sparta, which was a totalitarian State, had as little use for it as the Nazis had. But most of the Greek City States allowed a degree of liberty which we should now think excessive, and, in fact, do think excessive when it is practiced by their descendants in the same part of the world. Politics was a matter of assassination and rival armies, one of them supporting the government, and the other composed of refugees. The refugees would often ally themselves with their city's enemies and march in in triumph on the heels of foreign conquerors. This sort of thing was done by everybody, and, in spite of much fine talk in the works of modem historians about Greek loyalty to the City State, nobody seemed to view such conduct as particularly nefarious. This was carrying liberty to excess, and led by reaction to admiration of Sparta.

The word 'liberty' has had strange meanings at different times. In Rome, in the last days of the Republic and the early days of the Empire, it meant the right of powerful Senators to plunder Provinces for their private profit. Brutus, whom most English speaking readers know as the high-minded hero of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, was, in fact, rather different from this. He would lend money to a municipality at 60 percent, and when they failed to pay the interest he would hire a private army to besiege them, for which his friend Cicero mildly expostulated with him. In our own day, the word 'liberty' bears a very similar meaning when used by industrial magnates. Leaving these vagaries on one side, there are two serious meanings of the word 'liberty'. On the one hand the freedom of a nation from foreign domination, on the other hand, the freedom of the citizen to pursue his legitimate avocations. Each of these in a well-ordered world should be subject to limitations, but unfortunately the former has been taken in an absolute sense. To this point of view I will return presently; it is the liberty of the individual citizen that I now wish to speak about.

This kind of liberty first entered practical politics in the form of religious toleration, a doctrine which came to be widely adopted in the seventeenth century through the inability of either Protestants or Catholics to exterminate the opposite party. After they had fought each other for a hundred years, culminating in the horror of the thirty years' war, and after it had appeared that as a result of all this bloodshed the balance of parties at the end was almost exactly what it had been at the beginning, certain men of genius, mostly Dutchmen, suggested that perhaps all the killing had been unnecessary, and that people might be allowed to think what they chose on such matters as consubstantiation versus transubstantiation, or whether the Cup should be allowed to the laity. The doctrine of religious toleration came to England with the Dutch King William, along with the Bank of England and the National Debt. In fact all three were products of the commercial mentality.

The greatest of the theoretical advocates of liberty at that period was John Locke, who devoted much thought to the problem of reconciling the maximum of liberty with the indispensable minimum of government, a problem with which his successors in the Liberal tradition have been occupied down to the present day.

In addition to religious freedom, free press, free speech, and freedom from arbitrary arrest came to be taken for granted during the nineteenth century, at least among the Western democracies. But their hold on men's minds was much more precarious than was at the time supposed, and now, over the greater part of the earth's surface, nothing remains of them, either in practice or in theory. Stalin could neither understand nor respect the point of view which led Churchill to allow himself to be peaceably dispossessed as a result of a popular vote. I am a firm believer in democratic representative government as the best form for those who have the tolerance and self-restraint that is required to make it workable. But its advocates make a mistake if they suppose that it can be at once introduced into countries where the average citizen has hitherto lacked all training in the give and-take that it requires. In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting a sufficient number of the representatives of the other side to give it a majority. People in the West thought this characteristic of the Balkans, forgetting that Cromwell and Robespierre had acted likewise.

And this brings me to the last pair of great political ideas to which mankind owes whatever little success in social organization it has achieved. I mean the ideas of law and government. Of these, government is the more fundamental. Government can easily exist without law, but law cannot exist without government - a fact which was forgotten by those who framed the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pact. Government may be defined as a concentration of the collective forces of a community in a certain organization which, in virtue of this concentration, is able to control individual citizens and to resist pressure from foreign States. War has always been the chief promoter of governmental power. The control of government over the private citizen is always greater where there is war or imminent danger of war than where peace seems secure. But when governments have acquired power with a view to resisting foreign aggression, they have naturally used it, if they could, to further their private interests at the expense of the citizens. Absolute monarchy was, until recently, the grossest form of this abuse of power. But in the modern totalitarian State the same evil has been carried much further than had been dreamt of by Xerxes or Nero or any of the tyrants of earlier times.

Democracy was invented as a device for reconciling government with liberty. It is clear that government is necessary if anything worthy to be called civilization is to exist, but all history shows that any set of men entrusted with power over another set will abuse their power if they can do so with impunity. Democracy is intended to make men's tenure of power temporary and dependent upon popular approval. In so far as it achieves this it prevents the worst abuses of power. The Second Triumvirate in Rome, when they wanted money with a view to fighting Brutus and Cassius, made a list of rich men and declared them public enemies, cut off their heads, and seized their property. This sort of procedure is not possible in America and England at the present day. We owe the fact that it is not possible not only to democracy, but also to the doctrine of personal liberty. This doctrine, in practice, consists of two parts, on the one hand that a man shall not be punished except by due process of law, and on the other hand that there shall be a sphere within which a man's actions are not to be subject to governmental control. This sphere includes free speech, free press and religious freedom. It used to include freedom of economic enterprise. All these doctrines, of course, are held in practice with certain limitations. The British formerly did not adhere to them in their dealings with India. Freedom of the press is not respected in the case of doctrines which are thought dangerously subversive. Free speech would not be held to exonerate public advocacy of assassination of an unpopular politician. But in spite of these limitations the doctrine of personal liberty has been of great value throughout the English-speaking world, as anyone who dives in it will quickly realize when he finds himself in a police State.

In the history of social evolution it will be found that almost invariably the establishment of some sort of government has come first and attempts to make government compatible with personal liberty have come later. In international affairs we have not yet reached the first stage, although it is now evident that international government is at least as important to mankind as national government. I think it may be seriously doubted whether the next twenty years would be more disastrous to mankind if all government were abolished than they will be if no effective international government is established. I find it often urged that an international government would be oppressive, and I do not deny that this might be the case, at any rate for a time, but national governments were oppressive when they were new and are still oppressive in most countries, and yet hardly anybody would on this ground advocate anarchy within a nation.

Ordered social life of a kind that could seem in any degree desirable rests upon a synthesis and balance of certain slowly developed ideas and institutions: government, law, individual liberty, and democracy. Individual liberty, of course, existed in the ages before there was government, but when it existed without government civilized life was impossible. When governments first arose they involved slavery, absolute monarchy, and usually the enforcement of superstition by a powerful priesthood. All these were very great evils, and one can understand Rousseau's nostalgia for the life of the noble savage. But this was a mere romantic idealization, and, in fact, the life of the savage was, as Hobbes said, 'nasty, brutish, and short'. The history of man reaches occasional great crises. There must have been a crisis when the apes lost their tails, and another when our ancestors took to walking upright and lost their protective covering of hair. As I remarked before, the human population of the globe, which must at one time have been very small, was greatly increased by the invention of agriculture, and was increased again in our own time by modern industrial and medical technique. But modern technique has brought us to a new crisis. In this new crisis we are faced with an alternative: either man must again become a rare species as in the days of Homo Pekiniensis, or we must learn to submit to an international government. Any such government, whether good, bad or indifferent, will make the continuation of the human species possible, and, as in the course of the past 5,000 years men have climbed gradually from the despotism of the Pharaohs to the glories of the American Constitution, so perhaps in the next 5,000 they may climb from a bad international government to a good one. But if they do not establish an international government of some kind, new progress will have to begin at a lower level, probably at that of tribal savagery, and will have to begin after a cataclysmic destruction only to be paralleled by the Biblical account of the deluge. When we survey the long development of mankind from a rare hunted animal, hiding precariously in caves from the fury of wild beasts which he was incapable of killing; subsisting doubtfully on the raw fruits of the earth which he did not know how to cultivate; reinforcing real terrors by the imaginary terrors of ghosts and evil spirits and malign spells; gradually acquiring the mastery of his environment by the invention of fire, writing, weapons, and at last science; building up a social organization which curbed private violence and gave a measure of security to daily life; using the leisure gained by his skill, not only in idle luxury, but in the production of beauty and the unveiling of the secrets of natural law; learning gradually, though imperfectly, to view an increasing number of his neighbors as allies in the task of production rather than enemies in the attempts at mutual depredation - when we consider this long and arduous journey, it becomes intolerable to think that it may all have to be made again from the beginning owing to failure to take one step for which past developments, rightly viewed, have been a preparation. Social cohesion, which among the apes is confined to the family grew in pre-historic times as far as the tribe, and in the very beginnings of history reached the level of small kingdoms in upper and lower Egypt and in Mesopotamia. From these small kingdoms grew the empires of antiquity. and then graduallv the great States of our own day, far larger than even the Roman Empire. Quite recent developments have robbed the smaller States of anv real independence, until now there remain only two that are wholly capable of independent self direction: I mean, of course, the United States and the USSR. All that is necessary to save mankind from disaster is the step from two independent States to one - not by war, which would bring disaster, but by agreement.

If this step can be accomplished, all the great achievements of mankind will quickly lead to an era of happiness and wellbeing, such as has never before been dreamt of. Our scientific skill will make it possible to abolish poverty throughout the world without necessitating more than four or five hours a day of productive labor. Disease, which has been very rapidly reduced during the last hundred years, will be reduced still further. The leisure achieved through organisation and science will no doubt be devoted very largely to pure enjoyment, but there will remain a number of people to whom the pursuit of art and science will seem important. There will be a new freedom from economic bondage to the mere necessities of keeping alive, and the great mass of mankind may enjoy the kind of carefree adventurousness that characterizes the rich young Athenians of Plato's Dialogues. All this is easily within the bounds of technical possibility. It requires for its realization only one thing: that the men who hold power, and the populations that support them, should think it more important to keep themselves alive than to cause the death of their enemies. No very lofty or difficult ideal, one might think, and yet one which so far has proved beyond the scope of human intelligence.

The present moment is the most important and most crucial that has ever confronted mankind. Upon our collective wisdom during the next twenty years depends the question whether mankind shall be plunged into unparalleled disaster, or shall achieve a new level of happiness, security, well-being, and intelligence. I do not know which mankind will choose. There is grave reason for fear, but there is enough possibility of a good solution to make hope not irrational. And it is on this hope that we must act.

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11 Best Written Essays on Helping Others in Life-Need & Importance

1. Essay on Helping Others in Life |Need, and Importance of Helping others in Life

Helping others in the times of need is the basic instinct of human nature. It is the feeling of happiness and satisfaction that comes with being able to help someone in need that drives us towards doing good deeds. It is not only restricted to lending a helping hand during difficult times but also extends to small, everyday gestures that make a big difference in the lives of others.

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There are many benefits of helping others in life. The most obvious one is that it makes us feel good about ourselves. When we help someone in need, our brain releases serotonin, which is a hormone that makes us feel happy and satisfied. It also gives us a sense of purpose and meaning in life. Helping others allows us to connect with people on a deeper level and form meaningful relationships. It also gives us a sense of belonging and strengthens our bond with the community.

Apart from the personal satisfaction that comes with helping others, there are also many practical benefits. Helping others can boost our career prospects and open up new networking opportunities. It can also lead to positive changes in our society. When we help others, we set an example for others to follow and inspire them to do good deeds as well.

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Therefore, helping others is not only beneficial for the person in need but also for the helper. It makes us feel good about ourselves and gives us a sense of purpose and meaning in life. It also has many practical benefits that can boost our career prospects and lead to positive changes in our society. So, next time you come across someone who needs help, don’t hesitate to lend a helping hand. It will make a big difference in their life and yours too.

2. Essay on helping others is Important:

Helping others is a fundamental aspect of human nature. We are all connected in this world, and our actions have the potential to impact those around us. Whether we realize it or not, helping others can bring immense satisfaction and fulfillment into our lives.

The act of helping others goes beyond just lending a hand or offering material assistance. It’s about showing compassion, empathy, and understanding towards others. It’s about being there for someone when they need it the most, without expecting anything in return. Helping others is not just a selfless act; it can also be a source of personal growth and development.

One of the main reasons why helping others is important is because it promotes a sense of community and belonging. When we help others, we create a sense of unity and togetherness, which is crucial for building strong relationships and fostering a supportive environment. It can also help break down barriers and promote understanding between different individuals or groups.

Furthermore, helping others can have a ripple effect in the community. When one person helps another, it often inspires others to do the same. This creates a domino effect of kindness and can lead to significant positive changes in society.

Helping others is also crucial for our own personal well-being. Studies have shown that acts of kindness can boost our mood, reduce stress and anxiety, and even improve our physical health. When we help others, we release feel-good hormones like serotonin and oxytocin, which can contribute to overall happiness and well-being.

Moreover, helping others can provide a sense of purpose and meaning in life. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in our own lives and lose sight of the bigger picture. By helping others, we are reminded that there is more to life than just ourselves and our own struggles.

It’s also important to note that helping others does not always have to be a grand gesture. Simple acts of kindness and compassion, such as listening to someone who is going through a difficult time or offering words of encouragement, can make a significant impact on someone’s life.

In conclusion, helping others is crucial for our own personal growth and well-being, as well as for creating a more compassionate and supportive society. It may seem like a small act, but the impact it can have on someone’s life is immeasurable. So let’s all strive to make helping others a priority in our lives and spread kindness wherever we go.

3. Short Essay on Helping Others:

Helping others is a selfless act that brings about joy, contentment and fulfillment in one’s life. It is an innate human characteristic to extend our hands towards those who are in need and offer whatever assistance we can provide. Whether it be helping a friend with their studies, aiding a stranger on the street or volunteering at a local charity organization, lending a helping hand not only benefits the receiver but also brings about a sense of satisfaction and purpose to the giver.

In today’s fast-paced world, where individualism and self-centeredness are on the rise, acts of kindness and generosity towards others have become scarce. However, it is important for individuals, especially students, to recognize the importance of helping others and make it a part of their daily lives.

By helping others, we not only make a positive impact on their lives but also contribute towards building a better society. Small acts of kindness, such as volunteering at a homeless shelter or donating clothes to those in need, can go a long way in making a difference in someone’s life.

Additionally, by actively participating in community service and helping those less fortunate, students can develop a sense of empathy and compassion towards others, which are essential qualities for building strong relationships and fostering a more inclusive society.

Moreover, helping others can also have positive effects on one’s mental health. Research has shown that individuals who engage in acts of kindness and generosity tend to experience lower levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. This is because helping others releases feel-good hormones such as oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin, which can help reduce stress and improve overall well-being.

Furthermore, lending a helping hand can also serve as a learning experience for students. By actively engaging in community service or volunteering at organizations that work towards social causes, students can gain valuable skills such as teamwork, leadership, and communication

4. Short Essay on Motivation for helping others:

Motivation is a powerful force that can drive individuals to act in ways that benefit not only themselves, but also those around them. One of the most selfless and altruistic forms of motivation is the desire to help others.

Helping others can take many forms, from volunteering at a local charity or donating money to a worthy cause, to simply lending a helping hand to a friend or stranger in need. But why do some people have such a strong motivation to help others, while others seem more focused on their own interests?

Research has shown that there are various factors that can contribute to an individual’s motivation for helping others. These may include personal experiences, values and beliefs, cultural influences, and even genetics.

For some people, the desire to help others may stem from a personal experience of receiving help themselves. This can lead to a sense of gratitude and a desire to pay it forward by helping others in need.

Others may be driven by their values and beliefs, such as the belief in equal rights and opportunities for all individuals. These individuals may see helping others as not only a moral obligation, but also as a way to create a more just and equitable society.

Cultural influences can also play a role in an individual’s motivation for helping others. In some cultures, the concept of community and collective well-being is highly valued, which can lead to a strong desire to help others in need.

Lastly, research has also suggested that genetics may play a role in an individual’s level of empathy and compassion, which can in turn influence their motivation to help others.

In conclusion, the reasons for an individual’s motivation to help others are complex and multifaceted. But regardless of the underlying factors, one thing is clear: helping others brings about a sense of fulfillment and purpose that cannot be achieved through self-interest alone.

5. College essay on helping others:

As a college student, it is easy to get caught up in our own personal goals and obligations. With the pressure of maintaining good grades, participating in extracurricular activities, and building a strong resume for future job prospects, helping others may not always be at the top of our list. However, being selfless and giving back to those in need can have numerous benefits for college students.

First and foremost, helping others is a great way to gain perspective and appreciate the things we have in our own lives. Many of us are fortunate enough to have access to higher education, a privilege that not everyone in the world has. By volunteering our time and efforts to help those less fortunate, we can learn to be grateful for what we have and gain a deeper understanding of the struggles and challenges faced by others.

In addition, helping others can also provide valuable learning opportunities. Through volunteering or participating in community service projects, college students can develop important skills such as leadership, communication, and problem-solving. These skills are not only beneficial for personal growth but are also highly valued by potential employers. Volunteering can also expose students to diverse cultures and perspectives, promoting a more well-rounded and empathetic outlook on life.

Moreover, by helping others, we can make a positive impact in our communities and contribute to the greater good. Whether it is through organizing a fundraiser for a local charity or tutoring students in need, our actions can have a meaningful impact on the lives of those around us. By being active members of our communities, we can create a ripple effect of kindness and inspire others to do the same.

Lastly, helping others can also have a positive impact on our mental health. Studies have shown that acts of kindness and generosity can increase happiness, reduce stress and anxiety, and improve overall well-being

6. Essay on Kindness to others:

As human beings, we have the ability to choose how we treat others. One of the most powerful ways we can impact those around us is by displaying kindness. It may seem like a small gesture, but showing kindness to others can have a ripple effect that extends far beyond what we could ever imagine.

Kindness is defined as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. When we show kindness to others, we are displaying empathy and compassion towards them. It can be as simple as offering a smile, lending a helping hand, or listening without judgment.

The power of kindness lies in its ability to bring people together. In a world that is often divided by differences, acts of kindness can bridge the gap and create connections. It allows us to see beyond our own perspective and understand the struggles of others. It reminds us that we are all human and deserve love and respect.

Not only does kindness benefit those who receive it, but also those who give it. Studies have shown that acts of kindness can boost our mood, increase happiness, and reduce stress. It can even lead to a healthier heart and improved relationships.

In our fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in our own lives and forget about those around us. But kindness doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. It can be as simple as holding the door open for someone, saying “thank you,” or offering a compliment. These small acts of kindness may seem insignificant, but they can make a huge difference in someone’s day.

Furthermore, kindness is not limited to only those we know. It can also be extended to strangers. In fact, random acts of kindness towards strangers can have an even greater impact as it shows that there are still good and caring people in the world.

7. Inspirational Story on helping others:

Once upon a time, in a small village surrounded by lush green fields and blooming flowers, there lived a young boy named Rohan. He was known for his kind heart and willingness to help others without expecting anything in return.

Rohan grew up with his parents who were farmers. They taught him the importance of hard work and helping those in need. Every day, Rohan would help his parents in the fields, and after finishing his chores, he would spend time with the villagers.

The villagers adored Rohan for his kind nature and willingness to lend a helping hand. They often shared stories of how he had helped them during difficult times. But little did they know that Rohan’s kindness was not limited to just humans.

One day, a severe storm hit the village and destroyed most of the crops. The villagers were worried about how they would survive without food. Rohan’s parents were also affected by the storm, and they had no other option but to leave their village in search of better opportunities.

Seeing his family and villagers in distress, Rohan knew he had to do something. He remembered how his parents had taught him to help others in need, and he decided to put that lesson into practice.

Rohan went from house to house, asking the villagers if they needed any help. He helped them fix their homes, gather whatever food was left after the storm, and even offered his own food supplies to those who needed it desperately.

However, Rohan’s helping nature did not end there. He ventured into the forest to find wild fruits and berries, which he distributed among the villagers. Some even called him a hero for his selfless acts.

But Rohan remained humble and continued to help without seeking recognition or praise. His kindness was contagious, and soon other villagers joined in to help each other during difficult times.

Slowly but steadily, the village was back on its feet, and the crops were growing again. Everyone in the village had learned an important lesson from Rohan – that helping others not only benefits them but also brings joy and satisfaction to oneself.

Years passed, and Rohan grew up to be a kind-hearted man who continued to help those in need. The villagers never forgot his acts of kindness, and they passed on his lessons to their children and grandchildren.

Rohan’s selfless actions had a lasting impact on the village, and it became known as the village of kind-hearted people who always helped each other. And Rohan’s name was remembered for generations to come as a symbol of kindness and compassion.

From this story, we can learn that helping others is not just about lending a hand during difficult times, but it is also about spreading kindness and making the world a better place. As they say, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” So let us all follow Rohan’s example and make helping others a way of life

8. Essay on helping hand:

In our fast-paced and competitive world, the concept of a “helping hand” has become more important than ever before. In simple terms, a helping hand refers to an act of assisting or supporting someone in need. This could be in the form of physical, emotional, or financial support.

One might argue that the idea of extending a helping hand is not new and has been a part of our society for centuries. However, the changing dynamics of our global community have made it even more crucial for individuals to lend a helping hand to those around them.

In today’s world, where people are constantly chasing success and material possessions, there is a growing sense of isolation and loneliness among individuals. This is where the concept of a helping hand comes into play. By reaching out and supporting those in need, we not only make a positive impact on their lives but also create a sense of community and belonging.

Moreover, extending a helping hand is not only beneficial for the receiver, but it also has several benefits for the giver as well. It allows us to step outside of our own problems and focus on someone else’s needs. This can bring a sense of purpose and fulfillment in our lives. Additionally, helping others can also boost our self-esteem and confidence, knowing that we have made a positive difference in someone’s life.

Furthermore, a helping hand can also have a ripple effect. By assisting one individual, we may inspire them to pay it forward and help others in need. This creates a chain reaction of kindness and compassion, ultimately leading to a more caring and supportive society.

In today’s interconnected world, where news of tragedies and disasters spread rapidly, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless. However, by extending a helping hand to those affected, we can make a tangible difference and contribute towards rebuilding communities and lives.

In conclusion, the concept of a helping hand is more relevant now than ever before. It not only benefits individuals in need but also has positive effects on our own well-being and society as a whole. So let us all strive to be someone’s helping hand and create a world where kindness and compassion are the norm rather than the exception. As the saying goes, “A helping hand is no farther than at the end of your sleeve.” So let us all extend our sleeves and lend a helping hand whenever possible. And remember, every act of kindness matters.

9. Short Essay on how helping others benefit you:

Helping others is a fundamental human trait that has been ingrained in our society for centuries. It is an act of kindness that not only benefits the recipient, but also brings immense joy and satisfaction to the person who is offering help. In this short essay, we will explore how helping others can have a positive impact on your life.

Firstly, helping others allows us to develop empathy and compassion. When we lend a helping hand to someone in need, we put ourselves in their shoes and try to understand their struggles. This helps us build stronger connections with others and become more understanding individuals. Moreover, by seeing the impact of our actions on others, we learn to appreciate what we have and not take things for granted.

Secondly, helping others can boost our self-esteem and confidence. When we use our skills and knowledge to assist someone, it gives us a sense of purpose and accomplishment. This, in turn, helps us feel more confident about ourselves and our abilities. It also reminds us that we are capable of making a positive impact on others’ lives.

Thirdly, helping others can improve our mental health. It is a well-known fact that acts of kindness can release feel-good hormones in our brain, such as oxytocin and endorphins. These hormones are responsible for making us feel happy and content. By helping others, we can reduce stress, anxiety, and depression levels in ourselves and others around us.

In addition to the above benefits, helping others also allows us to expand our social circle and make meaningful connections. When we volunteer or engage in acts of kindness, we meet like-minded individuals who share the same values as us. This can lead to long-lasting friendships and a sense of belonging.

Lastly, helping others is a powerful way to contribute to society and make a positive impact on the world. By giving back to our communities, we can create a ripple effect of kindness and inspire others to do the same. This can lead to a more empathetic and compassionate society, creating a better world for future generations.

10. Short Essay on Satisfaction Comes from Helping Others:

We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s better to give than receive.” And while it may sound cliché, there is truth to this statement. There is a certain sense of satisfaction that comes from helping others. Whether it be through volunteering, lending a helping hand, or simply being there for someone in need, the act of helping others brings a sense of fulfillment that cannot be replicated by any material possessions.

So why is it that helping others brings us satisfaction? One of the main reasons is that it gives us a sense of purpose. In today’s fast-paced world, we often get caught up in our own lives and forget about the needs of those around us. By taking the time to help someone else, we are reminded that there is more to life than just our own personal pursuits. We are able to make a positive impact on someone else’s life and in turn, feel good about ourselves.

Moreover, helping others allows us to step outside of our comfort zones and gain new perspectives. It’s easy to get stuck in our own routines and thought patterns, but when we help someone else, we are exposed to different ways of thinking and living. This can broaden our understanding of the world and also help us appreciate what we have.

Another aspect of helping others that brings satisfaction is the connections we make with people. When we lend a helping hand or volunteer, we are often working alongside like-minded individuals who share similar values and goals. These shared experiences can lead to meaningful relationships and a sense of belonging.

Furthermore, the act of helping others can also boost our own self-esteem and confidence. By making a positive impact on someone else’s life, we are reminded that we have something valuable to offer. This can give us a sense of purpose and worth that may have been lacking before.

In conclusion, while it may seem counterintuitive, true satisfaction does not come from acquiring material possessions or achieving personal success. It comes from the act of helping others and making a positive impact in their lives. So, let us strive to be kind, empathetic, and selfless individuals who find joy in giving rather than receiving. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

11. Short Essay on My Greatest Passion is Helping others:

My greatest passion in life is helping others. For as long as I can remember, I have always had a strong desire to make a positive impact on the world around me. Growing up, my parents instilled in me the value of kindness and compassion towards others, and this has stayed with me throughout my life.

I believe that there is no greater joy than being able to bring a smile to someone’s face or make their day a little bit brighter. Whether it is through small acts of kindness, volunteering my time, or using my skills and knowledge to help those in need, I am always looking for ways to lend a helping hand.

One of the reasons why helping others is my greatest passion is because it allows me to connect with people from all walks of life. I have had the opportunity to work with individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, and each interaction has taught me something valuable. By helping others, I am also able to learn and grow as a person.

Furthermore, helping others is not just about making a difference in someone else’s life; it also brings immense fulfillment and happiness in my own life. Knowing that I have made a positive impact, no matter how small, fills me with a sense of purpose and motivates me to continue helping others.

In today’s world, where there is so much negativity and division, I believe that acts of kindness and compassion towards others are more important than ever. My greatest passion for helping others will always be a driving force in my life, and I hope to inspire others to do the same. After all, as Mahatma Gandhi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Q: How do you write an essay about helping others?

A: To write an essay about helping others, start with an introduction that highlights the significance of the topic, provide examples and personal experiences to support your points, discuss the benefits of helping others, and conclude with a strong summary.

Q: Why is it important to help others essay?

A: An essay on why it’s important to help others emphasizes the value of compassion, empathy, and the positive impact that helping others can have on individuals, communities, and society as a whole.

Q: What is the importance of helping others?

A: The importance of helping others lies in fostering empathy, building stronger communities, and creating a more compassionate and interconnected world.

Q: Why am I passionate about helping others?

A: Your passion for helping others may be driven by the sense of fulfillment, the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, a desire to contribute to positive change, and personal values or experiences that underscore the importance of altruism and empathy.

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Society Articles & More

How can we become better humans, there's a gap between our moral values and actions, but we can reduce it by increasing our propensity for moral action..

One beautiful summer day in the ocean off Panama City Beach, two boys out for a swim got caught in a rip current. When their mother heard their cries, she and several other family members dove into the ocean, only to be trapped in the current, too. Then, in a powerful display of character, complete strangers on the beach took action. Forming a human chain of 70 to 80 bodies , they stretched out into the ocean and rescued everyone.

Stories like this inspire me with hope about what human beings are capable of doing. Though we may face a daily barrage of depressing reports about sexual harassment, corruption, and child abuse, stories of human goodness help to give us another perspective on our human character.

But, as we know too well, there is also a darker side to our character. Take, for example, the story of Walter Vance, 61, who was shopping in his local Target for Christmas decorations. It was Black Friday and the store was mobbed when Vance fell to the floor in cardiac arrest and lay motionless. The other shoppers did nothing. In fact, some people even stepped over his body to continue their bargain hunting. Eventually, a few nurses used CPR, but by then he was too far gone.

Why do strangers help in one situation and simply ignore someone in need in another? This is one of the questions at the heart of my new book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? In the book, I outline the psychological research on moral behavior to show why sometimes we act morally and sometimes we don’t, based on who we are and what’s happening around us. Using insights gleaned from this science, I recommend steps we can take to strengthen our moral character.

The good and the bad of our character

While it may shock you to hear about Vance’s story, none of this is surprising in light of certain psychological research. For decades now, psychologists have found that if there is an emergency but no one else is doing anything to help, then we are very unlikely to help ourselves. In their famous “lady in distress” study , for instance, Columbia psychologists Bibb Latané and Judith Rodin report that when participants heard cries of pain from a woman who had fallen in the next room, only 7 percent did anything to help if they were with a stranger who was not helping.

This is just one illustration of the darker side of our character, but there are others. Studies have found that we are quite willing to cheat for monetary gain when we can get away with it. We also tend to lie to about 30 percent of the people we see in a given day. And most disturbing of all, with encouragement from an authority figure, a majority of people are willing to give increasingly severe electric shocks to a test-taker—even up to a lethal jolt.

Yet there is also much more encouraging news about character. For instance, Daniel Batson has done more than thirty years of fascinating research on how empathy can have a profound impact on our desire to help others in need. In one study , after Batson got students to empathize with a complete stranger experiencing a terrible tragedy, the number of students willing to help her dramatically rose to 76 percent, compared to 37 percent in a control group.

Other researchers found that cheating on a test dropped when participants first sat in front of a mirror and looked at themselves before the opportunity to cheat arose. And in the “lady in distress” study, for participants who were alone in the next room when they heard the cries of pain, 70 percent did something to help. Finally, in different versions of the shock experiments, when the authority figure was completely hands-off and the participant chose the shock level to administer for each wrong answer, the maximum was much lower—only an average of 5.5 out of 30 levels.

How to close the character gap

What are we to make of findings in these and hundreds of other studies of moral behavior?

While it’s important to talk about being virtuous—wise, compassionate, and honest—and avoid being immoral—cruel, cowardly, and deceitful—most of us aren’t completely one way or the other. There are exceptions, but the majority of us are somewhere in the middle, sometimes virtuous, sometimes less so.

Fortunately, there are promising strategies that aim to reduce what I call the “character gap,” or the space between how we should be (virtuous people) and how we actually tend to be (a mixed bag). Here are a few from my new book.

Emulate moral role models. Positive moral role models can be a source of admiration. But admiration is not enough: I admire what the U.S. curling team did in the 2018 Olympics, yet my life has changed little as a result. Rather, we need our moral heroes to move us and inspire us to emulate them.

For many years, research has demonstrated the impact of role models on moral behavior. In another study involving nearby screams of pain , researchers had observers rate how helpful participants were. When participants were with someone who jumped up and went into the next room to see what had happened, they helped much more often than if they were with someone who didn’t help.

Moral role models can be real or fictional people. They can be from the distant past or the present, well-known figures in society or someone who cleans our office building, distant strangers or close friends and family members. The more attached to them we are personally, the more profoundly they are likely to impact our character.

Use moral reminders. The customers who ignored Walter Vance or the participants asked to shock others in an experiment lost sight of what was important in life. Moral reminders can shift our attention toward what matters.

Recent studies on cheating support the role of moral reminders. In one popular setup, participants take a 20-problem test with a $0.50 incentive per correct answer. The control group has someone in charge check the answers at the end. The experimental group lets the participants themselves grade their own answers, shred all their materials, and then report their number of “correct” answers. Inevitably, the average performance is higher in this group, with some studies finding as many as double the number of problems “solved.”

Yet when a new group of participants has this same opportunity to cheat, but is first given a moral reminder—such as being asked to recall the Ten Commandments or sign their university’s honor code—the cheating disappears.

Moral reminders can get us back on track, and the more we use them, the more habitual or second nature they can become.

Learn about yourself. Learning more about the feelings, emotions, and desires that could be obstacles to virtue can also help reduce the character gap. Once we gain this deeper self-awareness, we can work on trying to curb and correct their influence.

For instance, the fear of embarrassment or of getting involved in someone else’s situation likely kept people from doing anything to help Walter Vance. Indeed, that fear may in part explain why, in general, helping is so much lower when people are in a group of unresponsive strangers.

University of Montana psychologist Arthur Beaman and his colleagues wanted to see how learning about our own psychology might reduce the group effect. When students in the study came across a (staged) emergency in the presence of an unresponsive stranger, only 25 percent helped. But for students who had attended a lecture on the psychology of groups and helping two weeks earlier, 42.5 percent helped.

In sum, the character gap is real and, in many of us, large. Fortunately, though, it is not insurmountable. These strategies and others can help us strengthen our moral character and rise to the occasion when moral action is required. In the world today, we all need to do our part to make sure we are not stepping over someone who is suffering, and instead lend a hand.

About the Author

Christian B. Miller

Christian B. Miller, Ph.D. , is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the author or editor of eight books. His most recent, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? has just been released with Oxford University Press. This article is an expanded version of his blog post at the Virtue Insight blog , and is used here with permission of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues.

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People helping one another Essay

Introduction, relationship, to repay good deeds, the need to be helped later, temperament.

The mind of the human being is the organ that drives all other organs into motion. Behind every act that a human being does there is a reason. One of the natures of human beings is helping those who are in need. This is based on various reasons. This paper analyses the reasons that lead to persons helping others. Among the items discussed in this paper are; the relationship between persons, the need to be helped later, to repay a good deed and the temperamental basis.

One of the basic reasons that lead to people helping one another is the relationship between the helper and the person in need. This more so happens when the two person are related by blood. A need of a blood relative is seen as a personal need to all other blood relatives and thus they would offer a hand in helping the needy come out of problem (Cash, 2002). The responsibility that one bears for a blood relative is usually not meant to be repaid.

Similarly, it is common for persons who are related by marriage to help one another. The need of a husband, wife or a fiancé is also taken by the helper as a personal need. The degree of closeness may differ from that of blood relationship. However, the weight that is carried in both cases is relatively similar. In most instances, persons offer to help their life partners in priority to blood relatives.

In this group also lie the persons who help because they have been requested to help. This group of people rarely helps willingly. They either perceive themselves incapable of offering the help or find they help as unfit or not necessary. Also there are persons who are mean in nature. Such persons can only offer help when they have been requested to do so (Cash, 2002).

Every person has been helped to reach where he or she is at one point or the other. A child is helped by her parents to grow, the neighbors, teachers, and relatives also give a hand in life. There is also help that has been received from friends and strangers. All this help is repaid in different ways. For the help received from parents, the child may repay it by helping the parents at their point of need or by helping his or her own children.

For the help that is received from all other persons, it is repaid almost in the same manner. A person may offer help directly to the persons who helped him or her or may offer help to others in remembrance of the good deeds that he or she has received form other people (Cash, 2002).

A person who has been treated well from childhood has a great likelihood of treating others well than a person who was brought up in harsh and un-conducive environment.

There is also a group of people who help anticipating that the persons whom they have helped will rise to the occasion should they have a need. This group of people will always be the first to contribute to others when they have a need and will always like to be recognized that they have offered their help.

The help that comes from this kind of people is at times seen as an act of dystopia. Such persons always imagine of bad things happening like death, accidents, injuries, attacks and other misfortunes. Lack of recognition of help from such persons can lead to quarrels between the helper and the persons helped (Mattern, 2007). To this people, helping others is bait or a bribe of being helped in future.

The human race is divided into different temperaments. The behavior of a person is thus attributable to the temperament that he or she belongs to. The likelihood to change a person from his or her temperament is very hard. The persons that belong to temperaments that are outgoing and extroverts are usually ready to help other people irregardless of the relationship or the amount of help that they might receive form the persons that they have helped.

The persons who fall under this category are usually public figures who do not have any relationship with the persons that they help. This group of people takes the need of every other individual as their own needs (Mattern, 2007).

As we have seen through the paper, man has different reason for helping fellow human beings. Though the reasons for help may differ, the ability to help also matters. There are those people who have the will of helping but lack the ability to help.

However, helping others is humane and the reasons for giving help not withstanding, there is no man who can make it without the help of others; whether materially, politically, psychologically or even socially. The persons receiving help have to be aware of the above reasons so as to know what actions are expected of him after receiving help.

Cash, A., (2002). Psychology for dummies. New York: Dummies.

Mattern, J., (2007). Do You Help Others ? New Jersey: Gareth Stevens, Inc.

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Temperament in Child Development
Temperaments Between Men and Women
Temperament Assessment: Benefits and Advantages
First Counselling Session: On Becoming a “Skilled Helper”
Children's Temperament and Personality: Genetic Basis
Design a helper
William Sheldon
Psychological Interventions: Becoming a Helper
Problem Solving and Decision Making: Study Analysis
The Skilled Helper Model for a Students' Team
Lying and Doublespeak
How can Peace be Achieved
The Bioecological Model of Human Development
Cognitive Dissonance
The Concept of Learning and Its Crucial Tools

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Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Community , Life , Love , Volunteering , Happiness , World , Emotions , Helping Others

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Volunteering to assist people in whatever way one can does not only make a difference on another individual's life. Instead, it also provides health benefits to the one who extends help. Studies reveal that those people who do volunteer work live longer than those who do not volunteer, considering the personal gratification one gets out of helping others. When an individual takes the selfishness out of one's life and trades it with selflessness, it increases the giver's sense of self-worth and gives a feel-good vibes for the giver. Helping people is very important in this society. Therefore, what is great about helping people is the giver of help gains love and happiness out of helping other people. There are many benefits why helping people is a great value of life. A helpful person increases one's appeal to others because many people gravitate towards those who help other people. When one sees another person extend help to another person, it enhances the sense of concern and kindness to others, which leads to a more united, responsible, and helpful community. Aside from these, it helps develop one's social skills as one gets the chance to interact with different kinds of people and make a difference in another person's life. It also makes one feel good about oneself upon knowing that regardless of the extent of help extended to another individual, someone else's life may have changed for the better. Helping people can be one's source of happiness and is thus beneficial to one's life. There is a saying that goes, "It is better to give than to receive". Unexpectedly, people who readily help other people feel great about themselves when they get to help another soul. When people help one another, a sense of community develops, which strengthens the bonds among humans. Furthermore, helping another person adds up to one's experiences as one meets various kinds of people that have different viewpoints in life. It also helps the giver to appreciate the small things in life that another individual considers as a huge thing already. Helping people, whether a classmate or friend, sometimes makes an individual's day pleasing and full of happiness. This is because when one extends help, it increases the feelings of connectivity with another individual. It signals the mind to release happy hormones that makes one want to help more people. When helping with a happy heart, one is assured that the happy feeling stays the whole day and can even multiply as more people become interested in helping the needy. Helping people encourages others to extend help as well. As one touches other people's lives, other individuals may also be encouraged to help more. Even those who previously did not think much about the needy could reconsider once he or she sees a chain reaction of extending help to others. Helping others makes the world a better place to live in. Especially with what is happening nowadays where crimes are a dime too many, helping other people suggests there are still some good-hearted people who care about another person's plight. In these instances, if only people will help at least one person every day, then even small children will have a better view of the world and will become more generous with their help in adulthood. People who help others have higher self-confidence, are happier, and have a healthy psychological well-being. This is because they do not have feelings of negativity when they help people. Instead, they feel socially connected with the rest of the helping community. As a result, they become happier and live longer. Helping others is contagious. It provides many benefits for those who help and recognize the need to assist the less fortunate. It makes people feel a sense of gratitude that they are not at the receiving end of things; instead, they are the ones fortunate enough to help other people. As this happens, love for neighbors and the community in general become genuine and the happy feeling of being able to help multiplies.

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College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

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Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will help you craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.

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Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
Tell you what to say and how to say it
Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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‘Hard landing’ kills skydiver at Florida airport, police say

Mark Price The Charlotte Observer (TNS)

A mishap at a Florida airport ended with a skydiver falling to his death Monday, according to police.

The identity of the victim has not been released.

DeLand police suspect it was a “skydiving accident” and continue to investigate the cause. Deland is about a 40-mile drive north from Orlando.

“Officers responded to the DeLand Municipal Airport at 2:26 p.m. Monday after a male skydiver suffered a hard landing,” police said in a news release.

“The male, whose identity is being withheld pending notification of next of kin, was pronounced deceased on scene.”

Investigators have not said whether the victim was an experienced skydiver.

It happened at Skydive DeLand, a skydiving destination based at the airport , The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports.

The company — one of the region’s “leading tourist attractions” — caters to novices in need of lessons and experienced skydivers who use its “full-service Drop Zone,” according to skydivedeland.com.

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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

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The Case for Marrying an Older Man

A woman’s life is all work and little rest. an age gap relationship can help..

In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.

When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.

So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me. But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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Accused Subway Shover Found Little Help in New York’s Chaotic Shelters

Carlton McPherson had been placed by New York City in a specialized homeless shelter for people with serious mental illness. It was not enough.

An ambulance idles in front of a brick-faced homeless shelter building in the Bronx.

By Amy Julia Harris , Jan Ransom , Wesley Parnell and Andy Newman

Before Carlton McPherson was accused of fatally shoving a stranger in front of a subway train last week, he was placed by New York City into specialized homeless shelters meant to help people with severe mental illness.

But at one shelter, in Brooklyn, he became erratic and attacked a security guard. At another, he jumped on tables and would cycle between anger and ecstasy. At a third, his fellow residents said it was clear his psychological issues were not being addressed.

“That man needed help,” said Roe Dewayne, who stayed with Mr. McPherson at a mental health shelter in the Bronx. “If they were monitoring him like they were supposed to, this wouldn’t be going on.”

As New York has struggled to provide services for homeless mentally ill people across the city, its mental health shelters were supposed to help fill a crucial need, with on-call psychiatrists and social workers on staff to ensure that the thousands of people like Mr. McPherson were connected to treatment, and did not harm themselves or someone else.

The reality has been different, a New York Times examination of the shelters has found. Based on city records and interviews with shelter workers, residents and their family members, the review showed that mental health services have been offered only sporadically across the 38 specialized facilities, which were operated by city contractors at a cost of about $260 million a year. Episodes of violence, disorder and preventable harm, meanwhile, have become commonplace.

Fifty people died in the mental health shelters during a recent four-year period, records show. About half of those deaths occurred after suspected drug overdoses, when staff members found the bodies of men and women slumped on bathroom floors, next to empty pill bottles or in bed with foam coming out of their mouths. Eight people staying in the shelters killed themselves.

More than 1,400 fights broke out during the same span, with more than half of those resulting in “serious injury.” At a shelter in Queens, a woman threatened her roommate with a Swiss Army knife before hurling a nail-studded two-by-four at a facility glass front door, records show. Another woman at the shelter tried to suffocate her roommate with a plastic bag.

The mental health shelters were also the scene of more than 40 fires — half of which appeared to have been set deliberately. On at least 344 occasions, the facilities lost heat, water or power for four hours or longer, The Times found.

Although the first mental health shelters opened decades ago, the city has dramatically expanded their reach in recent years, steadily adding funding and creating beds for about 5,500 people.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services, which oversees the city’s shelters, said the agency is required to provide shelter to all those who need it. She said it does its best to connect people to mental health services but added that it is primarily focused on providing emergency housing, not psychiatric care.

“Ensuring the health and safety of our clients is a top priority,” said the spokeswoman, Neha Sharma.

She said that the psychiatric services at the shelters are strictly voluntary, and that the agency cannot force people in the shelters to attend appointments or take medication. But the city has worked to improve safety at the shelters by training staff on how to reverse overdoses, prevent suicide and link the neediest clients to more intensive psychiatric services.

The city homeless shelter system is just one part of a broader safety net that has often given way in recent years while straining to meet a soaring need. Hospitals across New York have often discharged people in the midst of mental health crises while they were still unstable. Specialized treatment teams, which cater to some of the most volatile and difficult to treat patients, have long waiting lists, and they rely on underpaid, undertrained and overwhelmed workers who have sometimes failed to respond to signs that a person was unraveling.

The shelters have often become a place of last resort for thousands of profoundly ill people. Still, their failures help explain how people like Mr. McPherson can become dangerously unstable despite being flagged for extra care.

In operating the shelters, the city too often “kicks the proverbial can down the road,” said Mary Brosnahan, who spent 30 years leading the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York advocacy and service organization.

“It’s all about just trying to not have these catastrophic incidents,” Ms. Brosnahan said. “They are investing our tax dollars in a model that you just know is not going to give people what they need at the end of that day, and we all pay the price for that.”

On Monday evening, Mr. McPherson was on a subway platform in Manhattan at East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue when he approached another man and shoved him in front of an oncoming train, the police said.

The man, Jason Volz, 54, was crushed to death. Mr. McPherson, 24, was charged with murder.

Afterward, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would soon begin hiring clinicians to deploy teams of mental health workers in the subway system in an effort to keep riders safe. Mr. Adams has made addressing the city’s mental health crisis a priority since the second week of his administration, when a mentally ill homeless man shoved Michelle Go, a financial consultant, in front of a subway train in Times Square, killing her.

“People need the help that they deserve, and we are focused on doing that with the entire team that we have in place,” Mr. Adams said on Thursday. “It plays on the psyche of New Yorkers when someone is pushed to the tracks or someone shoots a gun in the subway system.”

Adrift in the system

Mr. McPherson had long struggled with mental illness, said his mother, Octavia Scouras. She tried her best to help him, but once he became an adult, she said, “no one was willing to continue to invest in him.” He spiraled out of control.

He moved in with his grandmother in the Bronx for a time, but a neighbor described seeing him sleeping in a hallway closet in the building after his grandmother began refusing to let him into her apartment. He became homeless and was sent to a mental health shelter in a rundown brick building in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn in 2023, according to court records and interviews with shelter staff members.

At the shelter, Mr. McPherson often greeted staff members with a smile and small talk. But one day in October, he grew agitated in the cafeteria and hurled a drink at the kitchen workers. When a security guard tried to calm him, Mr. McPherson, who had recently suffered a leg injury, used a cane he was walking with to strike the guard several times in the face, bloodying his eye.

Mr. McPherson was arrested and charged with assault and menacing, but the guard, Stephen Olowogboye, said he declined to cooperate with prosecutors because he knew that Mr. McPherson was struggling with mental health issues. He thought the younger man needed support, not jail.

“He wasn’t in his right state of mind,” Mr. Olowogboye said. “I thought, what if that was my younger brother, what would I do? I felt pity for him.”

After the assault, Mr. McPherson was transferred from the Brooklyn shelter and eventually landed at a mental health shelter in the Bronx, according to interviews with residents and his family.

The shelter, housed in an imposing brick building on Jerome Avenue and operated by a nonprofit group called BronxWorks, has been the scene of violence and disorder in recent years, records and interviews show. At least nine residents of the shelter have died since 2018, and there were reports of more than 60 fights and 62 life-threatening injuries and hospitalizations.

One man staying at the shelter followed a staffer onto a nearby subway train and masturbated in the seat across from her, records show. In another instance, a man clutching a large kitchen knife walked into the lobby and tried to lure a shelter officer outside to fight.

“Being in places like here, they really don’t help out,” said Mr. Dewayne, 60, the Jerome Avenue resident who said he met Mr. McPherson there. “Everyone in this building is suffering and hurting.”

At the Jerome Avenue shelter, Mr. McPherson mostly kept to himself and did not act out, but it was clear he was struggling, according to two residents who remembered him. He confided in his mother that he was scared and did not know what to do, she said.

“That shelter was the last place a person like Carlton needed to be,” said Ms. Scouras, who said she had worked at the Jerome Avenue site years before her son was sent there — and had witnessed the rampant drug abuse and violence.

“It’s extremely dangerous and deadly,” she said. “You would be terrified to go to sleep, let alone use the restroom.”

Residents were crammed into communal dormitories — as many as 20 to a room — and often had little privacy, current and former employees said. Those who left the building during the day and missed curfew in the evening risked losing their beds for the night and were often transferred to another shelter.

The workers there tried their best to support the residents, but resources were limited, said Andrea Kepler, who joined BronxWorks in 2016 and briefly served as the program director at the Jerome Avenue shelter. Psychiatrists were on call to do telehealth appointments, she said, but often the residents needed more intensive care than the shelter could provide. She described frequently sending people in the throes of crisis to nearby hospitals only to see them be released hours later with few supports.

“It was heartbreaking to see people struggling,” Ms. Kepler said. “It was a very challenging environment.”

Scott Auwarter, the assistant executive director at BronxWorks, said the shelter was doing as best it could to service a population with complex needs.

“We get some of the toughest cases in the system,” he said, adding that staff had connected more than 100 residents to permanent supportive housing. “We try to go above and try to be as sensible as possible. But we are on the record as saying the system really needs lots of thought and change.”

Widespread problems

In many ways, the Jerome Avenue site was typical of mental health shelters across the city.

Every year, the city collects data on how many deaths, injuries, assaults and other so-called “priority 1” incidents occur inside its homeless shelters. The Times obtained and analyzed those records for mental health shelters from 2018 to 2021 and found that more than 7,400 serious incidents were reported during that time.

There were at least 604 accidents “leading to life-threatening injury” among shelter residents, the records show.

More than 40 rapes, attempted rapes or sexual assaults were reported to have occurred inside the shelters, along with 140 thefts and 283 instances of “criminal activity in or around the facility by residents that threatens the safety of the community as a whole.”

Behind the numbers were searing snapshots of individual suffering.

One man living in a Brooklyn shelter hanged himself with a bedsheet. Another leaped off the Brooklyn Bridge. A woman at a Bronx mental health shelter told staff she was hearing voices in the days before she jumped to her death in front of a subway train in 2020, records show.

At a mental health shelter along Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn in 2022, a man with bipolar disorder made a noose with a bedsheet and tried to hang himself from a toilet stall, declaring that he was “Jesus Christ, and I have to die for y’all.” When the shelter’s workers tried to help him, he ran out of the bathroom, threw a garbage bin at the workers and was eventually taken to a hospital.

At the same facility a few weeks later, a man smashed some windows, took up a piece of broken glass and threatened to use it to slit his throat.

In interviews, five people who have worked at the shelters said the city’s system was ill-equipped to handle the complex needs of the mentally ill. Rather than recognizing the violent outbursts as untreated symptoms of a psychiatric problem, and connecting these people to more intensive care and supportive housing, some officials take an easier path, the people said.

They simply move the sickest patients from one shelter to the next — further destabilizing those who need stability and increasing the likelihood of a breakdown.

Liset Cruz and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described a rule at city-run mental health homeless shelters. During the day, residents are expected to leave the dormitories where they sleep at night; they are not expected to leave the building.

How we handle corrections

Amy Julia Harris has been an investigative reporter for more than a decade and joined The Times in 2019. Her coverage focuses on New York. More about Amy Julia Harris

Jan Ransom is an investigative reporter on the Metro desk focusing on criminal justice issues, law enforcement and incarceration in New York. More about Jan Ransom

Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Andy Newman

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Ideas That Have Helped Mankind Summary and Analysis

Table of contents

Prehistoric Ideas that have Helped Mankind

Evolution of Language

Discovery of Fire and its Use

Art of Writing

Domestication of Animals

Agricultural Inventions

Historical Ideas

Law of Inertia by Galileo

Laws of Motion (Newton’s)

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Psychology (The Science of Behavior and Mind)

Moral Principles

Personal Liberty

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