Selfishness is bad. That's what we're taught from day one. “Stop thinking about yourself and think about others for a change!” The theory is that most of us are born selfish, and need to be trained to cooperate, share, and care about others. Without this education, we would all be monsters, stabbing each other, hoarding treasure, and eating the poor.
I'm not convinced everyone needs to be taught selflessness. Some of us are pretty selfless already, to a fault. Weak, spineless milquetoasts always find themselves buckling under when someone makes demands. They can’t say no. They swallow their own beliefs and go along with the desires of others. The world is full of such people.
And lately, I'm forced to admit I am one of them. I need to learn how to be more selfish.
"What?” say a few choice people. “That's bullshit! You're one of the most selfish people I know!"
(Okay, okay – let’s be honest: one choice person says this. And he knows who he is.)
No, friend, I'm not selfish. If I appear that way, it's because I often isolate myself from others. I do this to avoid being pressured into doing something I don't want to do. It's difficult to face people and risk being engulfed by their needs. It's easier to hide.
When I get asked for something, I typically find myself overwhelmed with empathy for the point of view of the other person. I used to brag that I can sympathize with any person or position I encounter. Serial killers and child molesters can sway me with their arguments - which is a ridiculous way for me to be.
There are times when empathy ceases to be a benefit and becomes a liability. That point is reached when my own beliefs and desires seem vague and mysterious, but the desires of others make perfect sense. Instead of being an advocate for myself and my own perspective, I end up being an advocate for the person arguing with me.
When an acquaintance asks for a favour, I find myself thinking:
"Well, who am I to say no? Maybe they're right. Maybe their perspective does make more sense than my own. They certainly seem to make sense."
To put it in therapy speak, I have a weak sense of "boundaries". The line between myself and another person is soft, at best.
An example:
"Hey Nik! Do you want to go to some bar, and see some band?"
In my heart, the answer is no. It’s totally not my thing. But I let myself be pressured by the person. I give in. I go along with their desires and ignore my own.
Doing something to support a friend once in a while is noble. The problem is, I find myself giving in every single time I'm asked. I always forget to consider what it is that I want.
It's only later, at the concert, that I grumble quietly to myself. What am I doing here? How did I end up in this situation? I hate this band; everyone around me is drunk; my ears ache from the noise. How did I end up in this position?
I feel angry. I feel like an idiot for doing something I don't want to do. I resent my friend for "dragging me" there. Simultaneously, I feel like I have no real right to complain. No one held a gun to my head. I went of my own free will. My friend didn't do anything wrong. I did.
There's another weird aspect to all of this -- in the past, I have viewed this fault as a strength. My ability to over-empathize once seemed like a talent. “I can empathize with criminals!” The same thing is true of my willingness to accommodate others. I used to think it meant I was a good and supportive friend, who was up for anything. Isn't that something to be admired?
Now I get it. If I constantly give in to the needs and desires of other people, it doesn't make me a good person. It makes me LESS of a person, MORE of a shadow.
Which is why I need to be more selfish. Maybe “selfish” isn’t the right word. Maybe I just need to be more vocal about how I feel and what I want.
For example:
I need a day's notice, minimum, before I can engage in some kind of social activity. That's how I work. You can't just call me and say, "Let's go hang out right now!" I can't do it. I need a day or so to steel myself, for interaction. Why? Because I'm an introvert, and I find being with other people draining. That's how I am, right or wrong, and those are my rules. For now.
Is this unreasonable? I don't think so. But some part of me immediately starts making excuses and arguments -- for other people.
"Why can't you be spontaneous? You can't just get together with me, at a minute's notice? What's wrong with you? There's introverted, and then there's being a stick in the mud. Dude, you need to relax!"
If you're not me, this is a perfectly reasonable argument. But I am me. I know how I work, and I need a day's notice. Sorry.
No, wait. Fuck that. I'm not sorry.
And then there's Ayn Rand.
I hate Ayn Rand. I think she was a lunatic, not to mention something much worse – a bad writer. Unfortunately, she is famous for saying that selfishness is good. And when I talk about boundaries and being true to myself and all of that, I feel like I'm defending the beliefs of Ayn Rand.
(And certain “friends” of mine hear me say, “Maybe people need to be more selfish,” and they start calling me a Randroid. Why? Because those “friends” are actually assholes.)
Let’s be clear – there’s the libertarian view of selfishness, and then there’s just not letting other people walk all over you. Libertarians want as little taxation and government as possible. They want to be left alone -- with their money.
I’m a socialist (more or less) and I recognize the value of taxing the rich and spreading the wealth. Libertarians claim if they were taxed less, they would give more to charity. This strikes me as horseshit. Left to their own devices, the wealthy sit atop piles of gold and defend their wealth with a machine gun.
American Vice-President Joe Biden once famously said that paying taxes is patriotic. He later tried to back away from that statement as quickly as possible. Which is weird, because I think he’s right. If you love something, believe in something, and want to support it, you do so with your heart and your time and your wallet.
No libertarian thinks this way. If Ayn Rand heard me saying this stuff, she’d punch me in the face.
The selfishness I advocate is purely psychological. Stand up for what you believe, and argue your own point of view. Defend yourself. Express yourself.
Trouble is, my overly selfless asshole friends see this as one step closer to Conservative, capitalist, Libertarian madness. Somehow, they miss all the subtle nuances, and jump straight to, “You like Ayn Rand!”
And they say it in that childish teasing tone reserved for school yard taunts.
So let me counter their arguments with a witty pre-emptive strike: Go fuck yourself, you unthinking, pre-programmed fucktards.
How did I become a milquetoast in the first place?
I suspect that’s how we were raised in my family. If someone wanted to go into your room, they did. If they wanted to take all the posters off your walls and give them to a friend, they did. On one memorable occasion, I pissed off one of my brothers (probably by smashing their heads together) and one of them (or both?) pissed on my pillow for revenge. None of these acts resulted in parental consequences of any kind.
Someone summarized our family's insanity with a choice sentence. He meant it to be a compliment, but it’s pretty damning:
"There is no expectation of privacy in the Maack family."
Which means if you tell someone a secret, they're free to share it with anyone.
All of this adds up to one thing: we were raised without boundaries.
Like I said previously, people often mistake their strengths for weaknesses and their weaknesses for strengths. If you’re raised without boundaries, this can seem like a positive thing.
“We can talk about anything with each other. We’re all so close. There’s no small talk in our family. We share everything. We're not like other families, where nothing gets discussed.”
Instead, each person in the family is a bucket of slop, constant spilling their lives into other people, everyone getting mixed together and lost. Everyone is diminished. Nothing ever getting accomplished.
One quick and dirty example: my parents have been at war with each other for as long as I can remember. A parent with a good sense of boundaries would understand that you don’t drag your kids into that fight. My parents regularly shared their grief with us – and expected us to choose sides in their battles. They continue to do this to this very day.
Having a sense of self, being a complete person, having boundaries, means being able to move through the world and make choices. When everyone around you is a potential threat, breaking into your headspace and changing you, you’re in trouble. A person needs to be somewhat self-contained, to be capable of dealing with the world.
While mulling over all of this, I heard a quote which summed it up nicely:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
-- Rabbi Hillel
Obviously, it’s the first sentence of the quote that interests me most. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Or, to put it another way, if I don’t take myself seriously, why should anyone else?
Strangely, many of us milquetoast-types choke on this idea of “being for ourselves”. There’s this sense that we must always think of others, act for others, BE for others. But I need some balance. If I’m always thinking of the people around me, and never of myself, I can’t really help the people around me. I end up resenting them.
At heart, it all comes back to riding an airplane. When there’s some kind of disaster, and your plane is going down, masks fall out of the ceiling. Parents are always warned to put their oxygen masks on first – THEN put the air mask on their children.
And that, I think, sums it up nicely. You need to look after yourself, so you have the strength to look after the people around you. If you’re a complete mess, chances are good your version of help is just going to make things worse.
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5 comments:
Yes. You were a pushover before and let people walk all over you. That doesn't mean you should go to the opposite extreme and be entirely selfish.
Yes, there is more than one person who thinks you're selfish. You're pretty much entirely drawn inward. I am pretty inward myself but after being forced to go out and do things, and sometimes selfless acts for other people, i feel that it was a good experience for me.
If anyone should be more selfless, it's you. Your free time is spent entirely doing things you want. Perhaps you need to think of the selfless acts which many have done for you. It can even be dead people who gave you things like a 40 hour work week.
Maybe it's time for you to do something. Moping around isn't very healthy. I should know.
I do find your "I am not a Randroid, but selfishness is good and charity hurts my head and gives me migraines" philosophy to be very interesting.
Sometimes you need to say "Fuck It!" and break your fucking shell. Smash it to pieces and let yourself go. You go to far more interesting places, with interesting people.
If you want to talk to me, call me or meet me in person and tell me what you think. How about this weekend? Or name a time and place. I'll buy you a coffee. We could do lunch.
Because you talk tough online. But despite the fact that you have supposedly come out of your shell, you keep making excuses when I invite you over.
Why, it's as if you haven't come out of your shell at all.
Life is always about finding balance. Problems arise in the extremes. Real problems occur when we are too selfish, or too selfless. We all need to find the proper balance that would make us a good-hearted, kind, giving person, who is, nevertheless, not also a weak, ineffectual pushover.
It's not easy to find and maintain that balance. But, in my opinion, that's the goal we should all be striving for.
We should all be willing to give of ourselves what we can to those who are in legitimate need. The trick is, in any given situation, to recognize exactly when the one with the greatest and most legitimate need might be our own selves.
VanHam: well said.
I have seen people who won't help anyone. I've seen people addicted to helping everyone BUT themselves. I've seen people with boundaries 80 feet thick. I've seen people without boundaries who insist everyone live that way -- a walking wound that never scabs over.
And, amusingly, all of them tell me I should live exactly the way they do, because their way is the only valid way to live. We each have to find our own balance.
Why is it that everyone who responds to your blog sounds like a licensed, tenured professor of [insert topic]? Can't anyone relate or respond without shoving a broom handle up their ass and waddling up to a pulpit?
Now, once upon a time, when I was but a boy, my mother went through a full year's worth of behaving like a horrible, evil cunt. I got home from school about an hour before she came in from work and that hour quickly became a strange one indeed. For in that hour I had to absorb the only true peace I could expect for the rest of the evening, while simultaneously running round the house and yard, looking for anything that she might decide, upon her arrival, was out of its place. And if anything was out of its place, why she'd scream her lungs out over it for a good quarter of an hour.
Piece of dog-shit in the yard? Door slams and tirade commences. Dishes not unloaded from the dishwasher? "Jesus fucking Christ! Do I have to do everything?!"
I was fifteen, I think, and certainly not the best housekeeper -- still, I made a pretty effort in the hopes of placating the beast that then assumed the face and figure of my mother. But my efforts didn't really matter. If something was up her ass at work, something was sure to wedge its way up mine at home. I learned to walk on eggshells; to be quiet; to live small; to stay out of her way.
Eventually she got better (no, it wasn't menopause) and stopped being an obnoxious bitchy asshole. Well, stopped being such an overwhelming one. Anyway, she got better. I didn't.
Fast-forward a few years: I find myself twenty-something years old having to unlearn being small; having to mindfully train myself to put my full weight down on the eggshells and let the fucking things crunch; how to decide what I want and then own to it, both privately and publicly.
And I'm still working on it. Right now I'm getting ready to move. I've decided I don't want any help from family. I want to take a completely independent step. I also don't want to hear the comments on how I might 'do it better,' or 'get that cheaper,' etc. So, you know what? I'm just not telling them. I've given notice at work, I've committed myself to be out of my current residence by the end of the month, and no one's the wiser. Because that's what I want.
By all means, call it selfishness! I do. I like the term. It's appropriate, and it's just what we need. We, who were either born or trained to be mindful of others first and our own selves last should state boldly our intents: "I will be selfish!" and let the inconsiderate conjecture on the phraseology as they may.
The rest of you can run down to the learning annex and look into Compassion 101, but I've taken that course already. I'll be here if you need me, honing my self-determination jutsu.
Katsu!
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