Can you buy a feeling?

I've just tried. Well I haven't. I just did something I've been meaning
to do for ages. I gave £100 to a charity which provides healthy meals
for Sri Lankan children at school.

That money is about enough to ensure one child gets six months of
healthy school meals. The meals should be the healthiest they'll get
because a lot of Sri Lanka is impoverished. The reason the charity was
started was because children were faint in class because there parents
would send them to school but wouldn't have the money to feed them.

That £100 has extended another person's life. The research evidence
shows that childhood malnutritition is linked to adult morbidity and
life expectancy. I've bought a few extra years of life for someone I
never met before. They'll also be able to learn better so they'll be
smarter when they get older and that should give them better life chances.

I'm feeling pretty rotten and hadn't appreciated what I'd done when I
did. Right now I've been trying to think of things to make me feel
better and I thought of what I'd done. I'd done something good and I
think it was pretty selfless. That's a thing to feel good about. I was
doing it because it was something I'd been meaning to do and got no
positive benefit at the time. But I'm going to take the positive benefit
from it because I need it right now. The lack of immediate positive
benefit may simply have been part of a delayed reaction or it may be a
sign of the low that I'm going through, and through which I'm finding
ways for me to feel better.

That moment has started this thought process and I suppose answered a
question that has a pretty obvious answer anyway: yes, you can buy a
feeling. It's even better when that purchase also helps to buy a longer
and better life.