"You don’t do good things because you’re a good person. You become a good person by doing good things."

Started Rutger Bregman's new book, Moral Ambition, this weekend. I really enjoyed one of his previous books so I've been looking forward to this one.

I really like this sentiment, that morality is something that is forged over time rather than a starting place. It also places action as the core thing that truly matters. Good intentions are not enough to make you good. It's not a belief system or a sense of identity, morality is something you do.

It reminds me of a short film in the anthology, Paris, je'taime, in which a man is getting ready to leave his wife for a mistress when his wife tells him that she has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Instead of leaving, he chooses to stay and care for her until she dies. This brings about a change in him and his understanding of happiness. The vignette ends with the line, "by acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again."

I find myself coming back to this story over and over again as a picture of how selflessness changes us from the outside in. While there are certainly issues with this portrayal of a marriage (the betrayal and deception as a starter), I think this underlying idea rings true to what Bregman is saying: we learn how to be good people by doing good things. It's the ethical version of 'fake it 'till you make it.'