Regular readers know I’ve read a lot about psychology, anthropology, economics, and why people do things. According to most theories, donating blood shouldn’t make much sense. It doesn’t cost that much in time, nothing in money, and has a low risk of loss, but you won’t get much direct benefit. The odds of you receiving your own blood are zero.

Materially speaking, donating is a dead weight loss, but if enough people do it, we all benefit.

I think everyone views the act with high value. I won’t deny that I’m posting about it partly because I expect people will consider the act valuable, even after I state so, since everyone knows that sharing about it is part of the process.

The other part is to motivate readers to give blood too. You can’t read it in this picture, but on the far back wall the writing says 3 out of 5 people are eligible to give blood but only 3 out of 100 do. Read below my picture for what motivated me this time.

Here I am before they started sticking drawing blood, filling up those pouches on the counter before me.

---

Why I gave blood this time

I scheduled this appointment after reading a post from my friend and podcast guest Sebastian Junger on the fifteenth anniversary of the death of a friend of his, THE ULTIMATE TRUTH ABOUT WAR What I learned from the death of Tim Hetherington. It’s heartfelt and direct. It begins:

Fifteen years ago today, the landline rang in my apartment in New York City and I received news that my friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington, had been killed covering the civil war in Libya. Tim was in the besieged city of Misrata when a mortar exploded next to him, mortally wounding Tim as well as photographer Chris Hondros. Tim bled to death in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Misrata hospital.

Tim and I had spent a year, off and on, at a remote American combat outpost called Restrepo. I had brought Tim on my second trip to shoot stills for Vanity Fair, which had sent me there on assignment, and Tim quickly became interested in a documentary that I was shooting on the side. On his following trip he started shooting video as well, and soon we were alternating trips to cover as much of the deployment as possible. The result was Restrepo, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2010 and was nominated for an Oscar the following year. A few weeks after the Oscars, Tim and I were supposed to go to Libya to cover the Arab Spring, but I had to pull out at the last moment. Tim went anyway.

I also loved the book he wrote about his near death experience, In My Time of Dying, which included his receiving ten units of blood, without which he would have died.

• ← 850: AJ Harper, part 1: Write to change lives, including yours
• This week’s selected media, April 26, 2026: The Great Divorce and How to Know Your Self →