I actually used to occasionally feel weird about helping people because it made me feel good. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make sure I didn't feel good when helping, to try and do it in the most painful way possible.

What swapped me on that was that I realized I was often a more generous, effective helper when I could feed off the positive energy that came along with it.

I want to help people because they have inherent value, not for my own gain or status. So I asked myself, 'would the type of person who is completely selfless make themselves less effective as a helper just so that they could be assured that they were selfless?'

And of course they wouldn't. Being selfless is about considering other people to be more important than you. I was falling into the trap of treating my own moral status as the end goal; I was still considering other people to be less important than what I felt my actions said about me.

It's like when people assume that the opposite of pride is self-deprecation and then spend the exact same amount of time and energy obsessing over why they're bad at something.