We need to make room in society for selflessness.

Let me explain.

First, a definition : when I speak of selflessness, I do not mean the impossible ideal set by some religions of acting completely out of concern for others. That is a ridiculous notion. Every action done by every human being ever has been, is, and will be done out of the selfish motives of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. Whoever you are, whether you are a hedge fund managers living a life of self-indulgent excess that would make Wolf Of Wall Street look like Mister Rogers or a foreign aid worker risking life and limb to bring food and medicine to refugees in some godforsaken malarial swamp, you are doing what you do because you think it will make you happy.

Like I have said before, all motives are equally selfish but not all selfish motives are equal.

Rather than that outmoded definition, when I speak of selflessness, I mean the desire to devote oneself to something wholeheartedly, without one’s personal interests taken into account. This can be as concrete as being an emergency room nurse or as evanescent as wanting to follow a beautiful dream with all your heart. The unifying factor is that you are not primarily concerned with what are normally considered personal concerns.

Modern society pays a lot of lip service to this concept, but does not truly value or understand it at all. When someone is selfless, or has selfless desires, we treat them as weird. It violates the universal assumption of selfishness that is inherent in individualism.

Individualism assumes that we are all primarily looking after our own interests, and a society built upon this bedrock maximizes things like personal autonomy because those are the sort of things that make sense from a solely individualistic point of view and require no sense of any structure greater than a single person.

We have built our society around individualist assumptions. We all want freedom, we all want creature comforts, we all want a chance to self-actualize, and so on. This is a very solid foundation for a free and equal society, but it only goes so far.

For one thing, it does not include any idea of community. It doesn’t exactly preclude it either. Instead, it creates a massive blind spot towards it, and it is this exact blind spot that creates the problems with the sense of community and connection that plague modern society.

Modern society insists that everybody could and should be sufficient unto themselves. We are all expected to take care of our own needs, and only rely on others when it is absolutely necessary. A desire to help others is valued in the abstract, but unless fully focused into certain career paths, it is considered mildly socially embarrassing, and because we are products of an individualist society, when someone expresses a strong desire to help others outside of the topic of career paths, we don’t know what to say. We react either as if the person was bragging, or as if they had just confessed some minor social failing.

Above all, the individual is not allowed to say that they don’t care what happens to them, or that they are not really concerned about themselves as long as they get to help others. Even if placed within the matrix of individualistic thinking by saying helping others is what you enjoy the most, it still makes people uncomfortable.

We are simply expected to be primarily about ourselves and only secondarily about others. Even when we are praising things like romantic love and family, we lack the vocabulary to express it beyond a vague sense of “belonging” or “being part of something bigger than oneself”.

And old-time virtues like duty and dedication make no sense in a modern context. We have successfully severed all times with all the institutions that used to make us feel connected and complete, and replaced them with…. nothing.

The result? A quiet but deadly spiritual apocalypse, a black plague of the soul eating away at the public consciousness, resulting in record amounts of depression, substance abuse, extremist violence, and a pervasive feeling of absence and loss that people don’t even have the vocabulary to express outside of a feeling that there is “something missing”.

The truth is, while all human beings are individuals and should be treated as such, we are individuals of a highly social species and that means that treating ourselves and one another as if we were only individuals and nothing more is worse than futile, it’s massively counterproductive. If the goal is to maximize individual happiness and self-actualization, then our non-individualistic needs must be taken into account.

And a good first step towards that is to make it not just acceptable but understood when someone wants to dedicate themselves to something outside their personal needs and desires. We need to spread the idea that it is perfectly normal to want things like community, meaningful labour, someone to care for and about, and the company of like-minded individuals.

All of these transpersonal needs should be as publicly acknowledged and accepted as universal and normal as our more personal needs for love, sex, money, and status. If we could all just learn to accept that we all have emotional needs outside the tidy little cages of our modern lives, we could begin to turn our society into a happier, more stable, more mature, and above all more complete way to live that leaves nobody behind simply because they seem to “have it all”.

If you “have it all” according to society’s standards, and you are still unhappy, the fault lies not within you but within society’s very limited and blinkered concept of what people need in order to have a happy life.

We cannot find our way to a better way of life unless we lift our heads out of our personal feeding troughs and see the light on a distant horizon that is calling our name.

And that’s my thought for the day, offered free of charge, just because I want to make the world a better place.

Not that I am bragging.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!