Virtue is its own reward

Virtue is its own reward, right? And if anyone talks about something “virtuous” they’ve done, especially on social media, why, it’s nothing but "virtue signalling", just attention-seeking self-aggrandisement—well, that’s what the commentator class, those self-important, self-appointed adjudicators of all things proper, constantly declare, anyway. I see things differently: What’s a person’s motivation for sharing a story about something “virtuous”, and what’s the lesson?

That’s all a necessary disclaimer before I tell this story, one I wouldn’t have mentioned at all, except—well, that’s getting ahead of the story.

On Tuesday, I talked about how I went to a home centre called Mitre 10 Mega to, among other things, look at stuff for my various projects. One thing I bought was a 30cm metal ruler that I need when I’m using a craft knife. All I had was a plastic one, and the edge had little gouges in it from much use. I need a good edge when I’m cutting things, like right now as I work on an ongoing (and boring) project.

Tuesday evening, I went through the things I bought and noticed that the ruler had two hang tags, one flopped over, which seemed peculiar. I looked closer: There were two rulers stuck together, their vinyl sleeves aligned so perfectly that it looked like one ruler—until one hang tag flopped over. I didn’t notice it in the shop, and I know that the checkout operator didn’t notice, either: I was only charged for one.

I considered keeping the extra ruler. After all, it was “less than six dollars”, and that “big box retailer” probably wouldn’t even miss it, but: I didn’t pay for it, and the dollar amount really didn’t matter. I decided to take it back to the shop—an easy decision, since I had to go back to the shopping centre the next day, anyway.

Why didn’t I just keep it? Many people would, and that could’ve been me, too. However, I’d just seen the evening news and the brutality and war crimes being committed by the Russians in their war against Ukraine. The lunacy of the Covid “protesters”, both here and in the USA, was also fresh in my mind. There’s SO much negativity, aggressiveness, and ugliness in the world today, and I didn’t want any part of perpetuating that. Returning a $6 ruler I didn’t pay for wouldn’t and couldn’t make a bit of difference to any of that, obviously, but it’d make a difference to me, and that’s all I have power over.

So, yesterday I went and finally exchanged that stuff I meant to take Tuesday (putting it in front of the door worked!). Afterward, I took the ruler back. The lady behind the customer service counter seemed genuinely surprised, but I could tell she was smiling under her mask.

I carried on with my errands, and the next shop I drove to was the New World supermarket nearest to my house. Once I got home Tuesday, I found out I still needed a couple more things from the supermarket, and New World was near my final stop yesterday. It was a normal shopping experience yesterday, and as I was putting the last of my stuff in bags in my car boot, a gentleman roughly my age came and took my shopping trolley to return it for me (along with his own). I don’t think that’s happened to me more than a couple times in my entire life—if it ever has. I thanked him, of course.

The first thought I had was that it was a kind of karma-like thing: I did the right thing, and then something good happened to me. I don’t actually see things that way, and I feel it’d be pretty arrogant and self-centred to think the universe, were it a sentient being, would reward me for doing something so insignificant—especially because it was merely doing the right thing, not anything meaningful.

But… what if that really is how the universe works? What if making a conscious choice to do the right thing does get rewarded in a way that’s proportionate to the thing we did? Maybe the only way I can find out is to do more good/right things.

The lesson I took from this story is simply that doing the right thing is always the right thing to do—and that virtue really is its own reward. But it’s also made me think that maybe rejecting the world’s prevailing negativity might help spread the opposite energy instead. Even if it doesn’t, so what? Doing good things certainly can’t hurt. And that lesson—that reminder—is the most important one of all.

I took the photo above because I thought that me returning the ruler would catch the staff off-guard (and it did), and that they might not grasp how it could’ve happened. So, I took the photo to show them, to make it easier for me to explain. It turned out that I didn't need it. At least I probably gave the lady at the customer service desk a funny story to tell others—and I got a photo to use here when this story took on a new direction for me.