[mjlawson]

It's rather telling that you group substance abuse together with rather common and generally benign human conditions such as anxiety and neuroticism, and I find that your rather heavy-handed generalizations of people's capacity to help others based on their conditions and indeed their trauma dilutes your point.

It's as if you wish us to say, "I've figured everything out, let me show you the way." I don't find that particularly reassuring, and it's not exactly the kind of humility that I think you want to convey.

If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.

Now, I think your larger point is that folks in crisis should tend to that crisis, which I think anyone who has taken a plane ride would understand. Apply the mask on yourself first. But to extend that analogy, you can have a broken hand, or even a broken heart and still be able to help your neighbor.

[LawrenceKerr]

You are right that he is making some heavy-handed generalizations, but then again, he is replying to the OP making a very populist generalization about people with wealth as well, as if he has figured everything out - and OP isn't getting any flack for that. It may be the difference between American culture / "the new rich" vs. European culture, but my experience with people with great material wealth is very different and not easily generalizable.

> If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.

Logically that does not make any sense. If everyone is able to relieve themselves of their own suffering (no one else can anyway, in an ultimate sense), which includes loneliness, then there would be no more suffering. This is a Buddhist mindset that seems kind of harsh at first, but it's a reality people benefit from once they accept it: you must become your own savior. And once you are in good place, even just mentally, it becomes very natural and easy to help out others.

Problems only start when people reject this idea, and think they have all the answers to all the problems, and start enforcing their beliefs on others using violence - which is a trend we're seeing more & more these days.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> but my experience with people with great material wealth is very different and not easily generalizable.

Same here, just FYI. There's a reason that I couched it in terms of "I have seen..."

I know multimillionaire high-school dropouts, and dirt-poor people with multiple advanced degrees from Ivy-league universities.

But the community of which I'm a member, stresses the importance of getting our own house in order, before looking to others, so people with means can do a lot of good (or harm).