PART I OUR HERO AWAKES FROM SELFDELUSION
I’m a nice person. Or I thought I was – decent, at least. But when my editor proposed an altruistic challenge that would require me to be consistently good for a month – give money to the homeless, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help the elderly across the street – a part of me was worried. My concern was this: I wasn’t sure how much nicer I could be without becoming, well, dull. I already help friends move, surrender my bus seat to pregnant women and buy the first (and therefore biggest) round at the pub. I’m the one who gets up in the middle of the night to comfort our one-year-old when he wakes up, screaming and thrashing around like Neymar. I recycle. I carry a reusable coffee cup. I’m practically a saint. But when I tell my wife about my brief, she says, “Oh. That’s going to be hard. You can be pretty selfish.”
“What? No, I can’t. I let people in in traffic!”
“No,” she says. “You swear at everyone. You have terrible road rage. You only ever do what you want to do. We hardly ever see my friends.” “But they’re bor…” “You won’t go out unless it’s across the road. You only want to go on holiday if you can surf. You went on a surfing trip when I was seven months pregnant! Surfing is selfish. You have to ‘win’ every conversation – look, you’re trying to do it now.”
“No, I’m not!”