It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could
You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had
I've got lots in the humanity tank.
I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.
I felt very seen when I read this story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/ebrand.html
It's about a man who left home on a journey because something was bothering him and he didn't stop investigating until he figured out what it was.
It turned out (spoilers!) that he regarded his fellow men at an arm's length. He saw himself apart
I am of that kind and it causes me great pain. If I'm reading you right it seems you feel yourself in the thick of it with everyone. I hope you do not take that feeling for granted
Thus my girlfriend, who's a bleeding heart bless her, took serious offense at my conversation with the homeless guy who thought he was Jesus. In her mind, the righteous thing would have been to hand him a dollar and say nothing, because he's merely a victim of his circumstances. She accused me of trying to humiliate him or make myseld better than him by asking him why he was dragging this misery around like a cross. She berated me for it, because in her view of herself, being a good person in society means something different than it does to me.
I took it under consideration that maybe, the way I choose to immerse myself is too self-aggrandizing. I ran into the homeless guy a couple nights later and he asked for a cigarette. I apologized to him if I'd been intrusive or tried to judge him. He sat down and told me he didn't mind at all, he's trying to get off the street and off drugs and he doesn't have a lot of long conversations with people.
Neither one of us was right, me or my girlfriend... and to your point, a lot of times I really do just want to keep society at arm's length. But then I don't filter myself when I want to say something potentially offensive, and suddenly I'm in the whirlwind of the lives around me.
It really is two sides of the same coin, because the sicker you are of the world the more you either divorce from it or engage with it... and a lot of times you want to do both.
I saved the story to read. Thanks for the genuine response to what I wrote.