[Letter to Children] To you, the middle schoolers. A talk about what a 'benefit' really is.

"What's in it for me if I do that?"
"I'm not doing it because there's no benefit for me in doing it."
You said something like that a while ago, didn't you? Well, that's one way of looking at things.

But tell me, what is a benefit, anyway?
The spelling is M-E-R-I-T. According to the dictionary, it means value or advantage.
If you manage to get a benefit, what happens to you?
It sounds boring to call it value or advantage, so why don't we try replacing 'benefit' with 'happiness'?
If we do that, your initial words can be rephrased like this.

"What kind of happiness can I get if I do that?"
"I'm not doing it because I won't be happy if I do that."
How about that? Doesn't it feel a little easier to understand?

So, let's think about happiness.
I'm going to jump ahead a little, but there's a novel called A Christmas Carol. It's about an old moneylender named Scrooge.
The old man makes his living by lending money to people. For this old man, lending money to people and earning interest is his benefit. And this old man diligently hoards the money he earns for himself or uses it only for his own pleasure. He runs a company to lend money, but the people working there are paid terribly low wages.
For the people borrowing money from old man Dickens, being able to borrow the money they need is a benefit. But they have to pay back the money they borrowed. When they pay it back, they have to pay the borrowed money plus interest. Interest is a disadvantage. In other words, borrowing is happiness, and interest is unhappiness.
So, let's go back to old man Scrooge.
Old man Scrooge's benefit—his happiness—is the disadvantage—the unhappiness—of the people who borrowed the money. You get that, right?
Shall I give you an even worse example? Special fraud. Also known as 'It's me, it's me' fraud.
The money gained from committing fraud is built upon the unhappiness of the people who were deceived. It's easy to understand, isn't it?

And so, back to the story of old man Scrooge again.
At the end of the novel, old man Scrooge becomes a person who thinks about and acts on what he can do to make the people around him happy. He becomes someone who uses the benefit—the happiness—he has gained to do something to make everyone happy. He doesn't know if that something will bring him a benefit, but he realized that by doing it, he could become happy—that he could gain a benefit.

Sorry for the roundabout story. I want you to bear with me a little longer.
Even if you don't know if there is a benefit for yourself.
By doing something, you can gain something.
Sometimes you might lose something, too. Like time, for example. Or a little bit of money.

But you know.
If you were doing things that made someone in the world happy.
Wouldn't that someone who became happy surely make someone else happy in turn?
And wouldn't that, in the grand scheme of things, surely make you happy too?
I believe that is the true meaning of a benefit.
Doctors are the same, aren't they?
The treatment they provide to someone removes illness from that person and makes them happy. By someone becoming happy and continuing to work, they make someone else happy. That is how society functions, and through the cycle of various things, you can become happy yourself.

I always hope that you will become people who live with that kind of mindset.