Name: Why You Should Try to Be More Selfish
Uploaded: 2022-04-09T02:46:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The public story of selfishness tells us that we are - all of us - very guilty of the behaviour.

We are apparently incurably addicted to our own satisfactions - and deserve to be compared

unfavourably to pretty much any generation that ever walked the earth.

It sounds compelling (self-flagellation usually does), but the reality may be somewhat different.

Whatever the risks of excessive self-absorption and inordinate pleasure-seeking, the real

danger for most people is not that they too often ignore society and other people in the

name of their own needs, it’s precisely the opposite: that they constantly put aside

self-exploration and authentic inner development for the whims of so-called respectable opinion

and socially sanctioned duties and commitments.

The chief problem is not that we’re too selfish; we’re poor versions of what we

might be because we’re not selfish enough.

We spend our lives seeing people we have nothing in common with, working at jobs that don’t

make sense to us, craving the approval of parental figures who have other priorities,

going to parties we fear, sucking up to colleagues we hate, going to films that bore us, parroting

opinions we’re suspicious of, taking holidays that we don’t enjoy and devoting ourselves

to children who end up either indifferent or plain resentful about the care we’ve

Finally, in the last decade or so of life, we may try to ‘live for ourselves,’ but

Our connections to our own tastes and centers of pleasure and interest have atrophied, we’ve

forgotten how to be ambitious in our names, we have frittered ourselves away through millions

We are alive, but we hardly exist any longer.

A priority, while time allows, is therefore to acquire the skill of being politely but

We should - from today - simply stop seeing people we dislike and stop worrying to such

an extent about the opinions of strangers.

We should focus on what feels meaningful to us.

We should ask ourselves what we will wish we had done when we are on our deathbeds - and

We should wonder what we would do next if we had blanket permission - and go ahead and

We probably know the life we should be leading already, we have just been hoping - and should

stop hoping - that someone or something would come down from the sky and give us a definitive

We should acquire the art of being difficult, of smiling less, of saying ‘no’ more often

The world won’t fall apart if we neglect some of our commitments; perhaps we can afford

to forget someone’s birthday or to let the house get in a mess, fail to prepare a meal

or suggest that a grumpy relative make their own way back from the station.

We have grown quietly ill, or at least dull of spirit, through constant acts of self-sacrifice.

We no longer have as many years ahead as we once did.

We have allowed our fear of boundless egoism to blind us to the importance of developing

It may be time to take some baby steps towards intelligent selfishness.

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