An out-of-the-box way to Increase Happiness inside and out
by Jordan Myska Allen, who knows how to be happy and frequently contributes his insight to DailyHap. You can read more about him here.
Most people who live in modern cities encounter panhandlers, jobless, and homeless people while driving, walking, or even going out to the bars for a drink. Sometimes we give them change, other times we give them a ride, other times we scorn them. Most of the time they’re hardly a blip on the radar; other times we agonize over the guilt we feel for giving them too much or too little.
A simple way to help is to carry around some form of non-perishable food or bottles of water in your car/bag/purse. Although many have health issues the prevent them from eating classics like granola bars or nuts, out of dozens of offers only one person turned me down (which is their right of course). I find that this is a good way to keep my conscience clean for both voices in my head, the one that says, “Wouldn’t you want someone to lend you a hand when you were asking for help?” and the one that says, “I’m enabling them to go feed some sort of addiction by giving them money,” (both of which are admittedly presumptuous).
If you’ve got no food to offer and aren’t interested in giving change, I’ve also found that offering a smile brightens both my day and theirs. Just today I rolled down my window at a stoplight and talked to a panhandler who told me his girlfriend’s birthday is tomorrow, and she’d just been promoted to a manager at a nearby McDonald’s. Way to go! I left with a renewed energy and felt a jolt of happiness after just thirty seconds of obligation-free interaction.
Sometimes they hold up hilarious signs. Some are clever, some are brutally honest. Either way they’re people, and one way to view them is that they offer us the chance to be a little happier, since helping others has been proven time and again to be beneficial for mental and physical health.
What do you do when you encounter the homeless? What foods would you offer? Do you have any heartwarming experiences? Share them here and let’s get the conversation going.
Endnotes: As of the last, official count, about 633,782 people experience homelessness on any given night in the United States. The population is comprised of more veterans (62,000 homeless veterans on any given night), more mentally ill (about 45 percent of homeless people report that they have experienced an indicator of a mental health problem), and more with chronic health conditions than the average group of Americans.