How often do we walk by someone and say, “Hi! How are you today?” But, in reality, we secretly don’t want to hear any other response but “Fine, and you?”.

For the most part, many of us have our own problems and don’t want to become involved in helping someone else with theirs. Both me, and a friend of mine are quite the contrary with this. We sincerely care about others and what is going on in their lives. If there’s a riff, or something they can’t handle alone, we don’t mind being the ear they bend. It’s those who don’t want to do anything to help themselves get out of their circumstances that drain us –and believe me, we’ve had our share of those.

Just to test this theory on a small group of people, I recently had a series of personal and family emergencies happen in my life, which to say the least, made life pretty stressful for awhile. As friends and acquaintances would pass by and ask how things were going, I’d start in with something like, “Oh, things have been better…”, or “I’m have a bit of a stressful time now…”, and then lead into everything going on. I found there were a couple of people genuinely interested, but for the most part, you could tell they were itching to get away from me. It was rather amusing and with some, I couldn’t resist the temptation to tell them more when they were trying to escape.

This test confirmed to me that most really aren’t concerned about what is going on in the life of another, unless it is a circumstance that would support nothing other than a reply of, “I’m doing great!”; “I’m fine.”; “Couldn’t be better.”. Anything other than that would involve commitment and perhaps concern from the greeter who initiated, “Hey, how are you today?”

One has to wonder if this is the scenario faced by Australian news anchor, Charmaine Dragun, before voluntarily plunging to her death after receiving the biggest, most exciting promotion of her 29 years of life. A comment in the Daily Telegraph stated that people are now wondering if, “…we should have taken more interest in what was going on in her life”. You think?