[transcription from Apple Notes, lightly edited for clarity]
On Hope's recommendation, I'm gonna first record this audio and then upload it for it to be transcribed. I mean, in hindsight, it was just an easy experiment to ask to Chad UPT [too good to be corrected] to remain silent, but it couldn't.
Well, um.
I was going to tell this story because I guess one of those deep truths was felt today, but I kind of always. Have these big realizations when I get high, and then, in practice, it's difficult to put them into practice.
I went to a smoke club and I smoked a joint. And then, before leaving, I had to take a piss, so I went to the bathroom, and, as I was pissing, I was noticing some shit stains on the borders of the seat.
And I thought, "Well, that's not my problem. That's the staff's problem.". But then I thought, "Wa, what the fuck?
If you have nothing good to do, do good.
So I just grabbed the scrub, I took out the shit stains, and I clean a bit. And I remembered a whole chain of 'doing good' practices that I did a long time ago.
I kind of feel hesitant sharing about it.
I guess kindness of others is more important than the kindness that you give. But in essence, when you do good, you lighten up other people's lives.
I mean, I'm taking removing shit stains from the smoke club up to to those higher levels.
But we don't notice around us all the need that there is, and when I left the smoke club, I walked towards the subway, and I was thinking, yeah, doing good sounds like a good thing to do if you don't have a plan.
That's enough. There's nothing else that needs to be explained. It feels like a simple plain truth.
And behind that, there's moments of my life when I used to be more attuned to this, I picked up trash when I saw it on the streets, something I haven't done in years.
Well, I here's a thing: we're not present enough to do good, because we don't notice when people need help.
The other day I was in the subway, and a woman was in a crutches, and a man was sitting in the disabled seat, in the Metro of Madrid. He was on his phone, for a good number of stops. When his stop arrived, he stood up, and sort of scolded her: "haberme dicho!" (you should have told me), and the lady didn't respond anything.
And that seems so rude. Presence is your responsibility.
If we are not aware, even if we have a moral code, it's worth nothing. if the man had looked up and seen her, he might have stood up and offered the seat immediately.
And at the same time, I take responsibility in that, because I could have observed the situation. The man was oldish, mid 60s. It didn't occur to me to let him know "oh, have you seen that lady in crutches over there?"
Which is, I guess, doing good.
If I am that situation.. Doing good means walking up to the man and telling him. I'll find a lot of situations which could get hostile. I guess I would just laugh and say, "I just point it out because it seemed you hadn't noticed, excuse me for interrupting you". Let him make that choice.
That's all.
Don't expect to change the world with your goodness and don't be attached to what happens when you do good, because when you do, that's when we grow resentful about being on the losing end of a transaction.
But who am I to speak about doing good. I'm just telling the story of a bystander who saw this happen.
If we ought to act, it's to do good, other reasons are selfish, it's okay to have selfish reasons too.
But. Yeah, it's okay to stand out if you do good.
But I just feel. Uh, very comfortable in the background.
It's taking a protagonist's stance towards life, it's a gateway towards expressing myself, I guess, because I've been for too long in the background.
Let's just call this an empirical investigation into the nature of goodness.
What is your good act of the day? And make that your keystone. Hmm. I like lightweight methods. And that's a good keystone. If you haven't done anything, you would have to go and do it. Even if it's just picking up a piece of trash.
It has to be a selfless campaign, not for yourself, not for your family, not for your friends. If every day day, at least, we make a good deed, you will find a deeper and deeper meaning in it.
ChatGPT, organize this into a coherente essay:
An Empirical Investigation into Goodness
I decided to record an audio thought and later transcribe it. In hindsight, the experiment itself mirrored the subject at hand: I tried asking for silence, and silence did not come. What came instead was a chain of realizations; familiar, but felt with unusual clarity.
I often have these moments of insight when I am high. They arrive whole and convincing, yet translating them into lived practice is difficult. Still, something happened today that felt simple enough to hold onto.
I was at the smoke club. I smoked a joint. Before leaving, I went to the bathroom. While urinating, I noticed dried shit stains along the edges of the toilet seat. My first thought was immediate and defensive: This is not my problem. This is the staff’s responsibility.
Then a second thought arrived, quieter but firmer: What the fuck? Why not just clean it?
So I did. I grabbed the scrub, removed the stains, and wiped the seat down. It took almost no time. And yet, in that small, unglamorous action, something clicked. A principle surfaced—not as a moral commandment, but as a plain fact:
If you have nothing good to do, do good.
That was it. No abstraction. No heroism. Just action.
From there, a memory unfolded. I remembered a time when this way of being was more natural to me—when I would pick up trash on the street without thinking, when I was more attuned to small needs around me. I had not done those things in years. Not because I stopped believing in them, but because I stopped noticing.
That, I think, is the real issue. We are not present enough to do good. Not because we lack morals, but because we fail to perceive.
Later that day, in the Madrid metro, I saw a woman on crutches standing near the priority seating area. A man—perhaps in his mid-sixties—was sitting in one of those seats, absorbed in his phone. He eventually stood up at his stop, and only then did the woman react, reproaching him for not offering his seat earlier. He replied defensively that she should have said something.
The exchange felt unnecessarily harsh, but it revealed something important. Presence carries responsibility. Had the man simply looked up, he might have noticed and offered his seat immediately. But the responsibility does not stop there. I was present too. I saw the situation unfold, and it did not occur to me to intervene—to say, calmly, “Excuse me, there’s a woman on crutches here.”
Doing good, in that moment, would have meant stepping forward. Yes, that kind of intervention can become uncomfortable. It can even provoke hostility. But that outcome is not the point. One does not do good to control the response.
This leads to another essential principle: do not be attached to the consequences of doing good. Do not expect gratitude. Do not expect the world to change. Do it cleanly, and let it go.
In truth, even a failed attempt would have been preferable to silence. At least it would have been a story of action, rather than one of passive observation.
This is where responsibility meets agency. If we are to act, it should be to do good. Other motivations—status, recognition, self-image—are secondary. They may still exist, and that is human, but they should not be the driver.
I am naturally comfortable in the background. Yet there is something important about taking a protagonist’s stance toward life—not theatrically, but ethically. Acting when action is called for. Expressing what matters. I suspect I have stayed silent for too long.
So I frame this not as a moral sermon, but as an empirical investigation into the nature of goodness. A lightweight method. A single question:
What was your good act of the day?
Let that be the keystone. If the answer is “nothing,” then the task becomes clear: go and do one. Even something trivial—picking up a piece of trash—is sufficient. It must be selfless, but it does not need to be grand. It can be for a stranger, for a family member, for a friend. What matters is the orientation.
My intuition is that if one commits to at least one good deed per day, meaning will deepen naturally. Not through ideology, but through practice. Goodness, repeated, sharpens perception. It trains attention. It brings us back into contact with the world as it actually is: full of small, quiet needs waiting to be noticed.
That is enough. Nothing else needs to be explained.
I liked this experiment, I ought to repeat sober.