Teach a man to fish
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There's a proverb that says, "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". I don't much like fish, but then I suppose the proverb isn't aimed at someone like me. Given the choice, I'd probably have a sandwich, but if my only options consisted of eating the fish or starving to death, I guess a fish would become more appetising. If I were then shown a way to make sure I never had to starve to death, it would certainly beat waiting around on the off chance the person who gave me the fish visited again.
When I was much younger, my father sometimes used to take me fishing. I had my own rod. It was red. It was smaller than his, being as I was a child, but he insisted that size didn't matter and that it was what I did with it that counted. I didn't understand that until much later. What I did with the rod was sit next to a river, canal or lake and get bored. I certainly didn't catch anything with it. Neither did he. I can't remember how many times we went or for how long, but we never caught anything. Not once. Sometimes even the bait got away.
I had no interest in learning how to fish. I don't like fish... at least not as a source of food—I have nothing against fish in general. The point, however, is that I didn't learn because I had no interest in doing so, and most importantly because I had no need to. There was no benefit to me in learning how to fish. Had I actually caught one, I wouldn't have done anything useful with it. As it was, I wasted my time and got bored. I knew that, regardless of how successful I was with my red fishing rod, I would always be provided for by someone else.
All of this is a rather long-winded way of building a metaphor. I've never been a fisherman in the literal sense. I have since, however, made an effort to learn how to provide for myself. I don't catch or grow my own food and my culinary skills are adequate at best. But I have acquired skills that enable me to survive. Granted I do this in the more detached sense. While at the dawn of our species, all of us might have needed learn to hunt and gather, very few of us do that now. In the modern world, the majority of us have different skills that, through employment or endeavour, enable us to provide for ourselves and often for our families and loved ones too.
Perhaps that's why I'm always baffled whenever I meet somebody that has no interest in learning a new skill or, far worse, in making an effort to fend for themselves. Like most living creatures on this planet, we're genetically coded to find ways to survive. The issue is that we're no longer encouraged to do so. For better or worse, human beings are the first species to have outlawed natural selection. On the whole I'm in favour, but I think there are limits to how much anyone should be helped before they're encouraged to learn how to help themselves. There are times and places where this isn't possible, but in a developed society it should be second nature. I suppose that's why I have concerns about a world that finds it easier to just give a man a fish.