I’ve been thinking for a while about why people get so worked up over doing good for the camera. We have this fixation on “pure intent,” as if a good deed only counts if whoever did it is some saint asking for nothing in return.

If someone helps people and records it for YouTube, or does it because it makes them look good, we slap the label “performative” on it and write off the whole effort. But this purity test usually feels like an excuse to sit back and criticize instead of helping anyone.

My take is simple: if you’re starving, you don’t ask the person handing you bread to pass a personality test. You don’t care if they want likes, need a tax write-off, or were told to stand there by their boss. You just eat the bread. To the person on the receiving end, the help is concrete. A meal was served, a hospital bill was paid, or a life was saved. That tangible outcome is what actually matters, not whatever was going on inside the donor’s head.

Take an extreme case: if a child gets a lifesaving organ or blood transplant through a state mandate, maybe even from a convicted criminal, that kid is still alive. The donor wasn’t an angel, but to that kid and their family, none of that changes the outcome. Nobody lying on an operating table turns down a donor because the donor was a bad person. The help happened, and that’s the only part that lasts.

Spending energy policing the motives of people who actually do something doesn’t solve any problems. Most of the time, it’s just a shortcut to feeling morally superior without doing any of the legwork. Calling someone a “clout chaser” from behind a keyboard is easy. Worrying about spotless motivations is a luxury for people who aren’t currently in a crisis.

We also ought to drop the idea that anyone helping owes the public an apology for what they get out of it. If a YouTuber feeds a hundred families and gains followers or revenue from the video, the exchange worked: hungry people got food, and the person who made it happen got rewarded.

Better yet, that kind of setup is repeatable. Waiting around for completely selfless saints doesn’t scale. If doing good becomes something people can benefit from, far more people will compete to do it, and problems get addressed much faster. If self-interest gets more people fed or sheltered, everyone comes out ahead.

We should stop treating “performative altruism” like an insult and start treating it as normal. Treating help as transactional takes away the shame that makes people hide their motives, or worse, stops them from giving at all just to avoid blowback.

A community that keeps people fed out of vanity or ego is still choosing life over the vanity of the critics watching from the sidelines. Doing the right thing for a selfish reason beats doing nothing at all, every single time.

Then again, that’s just how I see it. You realize pretty quickly that people can spend their whole lives helping others and someone will still find a reason to complain.