Kev Kennedy's Blog

Generosity

I often have ‘When I win the lottery’ dreams. You know the sort: “When I win the lottery I’m going to… buy a big house, travel the world, build a hospital in Africa…” I like to think that I’m fairly virtuous because I always include a lot of ‘good deeds’ in my list of things I want to do.

But recently I’ve begun to wonder how virtuous that really is. After all, it’s one thing to give money away when you’ve got lots of it to give. And I imagine it’s easier to give money away when you’ve won it and you haven’t had to work for it.

You rarely hear someone say something like “When I’ve earned my first million, I’m going to…” Maybe that’s because we can’t ever imagine being in a situation where we earn a million.

Or maybe it’s because we think that if we earned a million we would be more justified in not spending it on worthy projects, but on keeping it for ourselves. Is it harder to give things away if we’ve had to work for them? To be controversial, is that why people who have had to go through all sorts of treatment in order to become parents seem to prize their children more? Is it why couples seem more committed when they have overcome significant obstacles, when it would have been much easier to drift apart?

So when it comes to money, how generous are we, really, if we would only be grand-scale philanthropists with money that cost us nothing? Truly generous people may never give a huge amount away, but what they give costs them more. I think that makes it worth more, somehow.
 

Created on Mon 28th September 2009 12:03