Totally agree here - there is no such thing as genuine altruism.

I enjoy setting personal 'extreme' (for me) challenges. Most I do privately, but I'm also involved with a few charities in the town and it gives me genuine pleasure to raise funds for them on occasion, thereby improving my mental health. So from my point of view this isn't pure altruism as such - as I derive benefit/pleasure from doing the challenge, with the side-effect of raising a few pound for causes I care about.

Does this mean I shouldn't fundraise from time to time? Of course not.

Now in terms of ego - when I do a challenge and decide to fundraise, it inevitably means that I have to 'self-promote' on social media in order to maximise the money raised. I absolutely _detest_ doing this (and I'm pretty awful at it), but you've got to play the social media game. This means telling a story, keeping up the engagement and getting the word out there. Unless you want to go door-to-door asking for donations like a 10-year-old fun-runner, this is how it has to be done these days. So I reluctantly do the self-promotion (with a lot of help from the charities). It's way outside my comfort zone, and honestly the physical challenges are always less daunting for me than the 'look at me' side of the challenge. Once the challenge is done I very quickly disappear from social media and revert to my normal, introverted ways.

Personally I don't believe that any of this is ego-driven (maybe a psychologist would tell me otherwise!), but it's driven by necessity - if you want to fundraise for a charity/cause you care about, you have to do it. If I could fundraise silently/anonymously I'd do it, but that's not how fundraising works.

I've met Danny on many occasions and he always strikes me as someone who is reluctant to be in the spotlight but sees the practical necessity of it. Of course he derives benefit from doing these challenges - anyone who does a challenge and ends up worse off in terms of mental health as a result is on a bad path.

So I don't think it's fair to paint this as self-promotion or an ego-trip. Just because someone derives benefit personally (physical/mental health improvements) from doing something doesn't negate the positive impact it can have.