It's nice to encounter people who help others. It's nice to help and it's nice to be helped as well. Helping is a thing that feels good on both ends. It fills you with joy to be able to help someone, do something to make things better for them, and it's awesome when you are in a tight spot and someone comes and lends you a hand. Think of the simple act of stopping while driving to let another car change lanes. Think about when your lane is over or you need to cross a busy intersection and someone stops and signals for you to go. That's a simple yet wonderful act of helping. The afterward reward of emergency-light blinking feels awesome, the hand raising from the window, or inside car, but so that you can see it, too.
Helping usually put you in a good light, as by helping you become regarded by others as a good person, and some use this in a calculated manner to be seen as good people. The offer help to different people in different manners: offer to help you with your homework or a project you are involved with, prepare breakfast/lunch/dinner for you, give you a car ride, tackle your finances... or anything they can do to help you. Though help migh be much appreciated, some times it's even quite enforced, so you have to adjust your plans and activities to allow them to help you in something you had otherwise covered. This might be a little uncomfortable, but you could think that you are helping by let them help you. It's already wrong when help is given not because a real desire to help, but because they are working on establishing an image, a reputation they don't really have.
One of the most classic cases of this are the politicians, who can't care less about people, but as elections come close they go out shaking the hands of the poor, kissing babies and getting pictures taken at children hospitals and homes for the elderly. However this type of behavior isn't only seen on politicians, as around us there's often people who are seeking an elevated, nearly canonized position, which they often tend to be vocal about. They offer to take care of the neighbour's kids while they are out working, and then complain that the children are undisciplined and how the neighbours are not giving them money to cover the feeding cost of the children. They may offer to give you a ride to the office and then bitch because you never paid the gas for the ride.
This sort of behavior kills the point of helping and feels uncomfortable both for the people who's being helped as well as for those listening to the bitching. If helping is such an imposition on you, why do you offer? Why do you continue accepting when asked to help again? There's people who want only not to be canonized in the eyes of others as a good person who helps everybody, but want also the dubious glory of being abused by others for their kindness. They don't even expose themselves to abuse - though some go as far as to do so - but they shift and twist things in such a way that they appear as the victims. That's disgraceful.
If you'd like to be known as a good person, then BE a good person, but if being a good person - in the sense you'd like to be known - is hard for you, an effort, a chore, then give it up and resign to the fact that you are not that type of good person. We all love and like helpers, but none of us need a fake helper who's use the chance to help someone to make that person into an abusive individual taking advantage of them, when that's not the case.
If you feel it in your heart, help. If you don't feel it, then keep on walking and keep your mouth shut too.
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