Ever scrolled down your news feeds on Twitter and Facebook without seeing a post about how a friend helped someone at a store or on the side of the road?

Well, I would like to commend those who acted with such humanity.

However, my problem lies with publicising everything we do for the less fortunate or those in need.

There is nothing wrong with reading about how you made someone's day by helping them out, but it would be nice to hear it from those you helped.

A friend of mine once shared a post that read "Let us leave our cameras when we are helping the poor," and that took me back to Michael Tomasello's writings about human altruism, which he explains as an act of helping others without expecting any reward.

But today, we see people helping others for social media likes, forgetting that life is not about blowing your own horn.

As Linda Ntuli would say, you cannot be a player and blow the vuvuzela at the same time. During a 2019 door-to-door election campaign, one of the leaders openly gave away R400 to a person he was visiting.

Is this what we do to win people's hearts and to become the talk of the town or do we help because we understand how important our act of helping can be to the next person?

Let us stop helping people for social media attention, let us do it because we want to change someone's life.

Lerato Clenton Selepe, e-mail