Selfishness, Selflessness, and Self-Care
I like to think of things in cycles, and I do not think that is unique about me. Cycles give all of us a good visual to work off of, usually giving us a simple understanding of complex ideas. Beyond that, we love it when a story comes full circle.
Oftentimes in life, we live in many cycles. The circle of life, itself, is an important lesson in the balance of life and death, how everything in nature gives and takes equally in the end. Sometimes a minor conversation in your morning becomes a funny coincidence by the end of your day, and that’s full circle. When a plan comes together, or when a mishap suddenly makes sense, another cycle is complete and we feel satisfied. Human beings like satisfaction like this.
Humanity’s appreciation for this kind of satisfaction is closely bonded with the fact that we are very self-aware. We are unlike most, if not all, other living creatures on Earth. We have a consciousness, a sentience, something beyond survival and reproduction: Purpose and passion. With purpose comes action. With passion comes pursuits of happiness. With all of that comes culture, society, and life as we know it. From clothing with functionality to clothing with personality. From tools to toys, from mating calls to music and dance. From bare minimum language into maximum artistic expression.
Humanity has been given the gift of self-awareness that grows into self-understanding. This is a beautiful thing, but it can have a dark side when unchecked. This dark side reveals itself when it starts us on a different kind of cycle, though it is not unlike any other cycle of balance or storytelling. This cycle starts when our self-awareness becomes selfishness.
Our sense of self has led us to more in life. More can be good, but this cycle that starts with selfishness shows us that too much of anything has problems beyond compare. We go from taking care of ourselves to worshipping ourselves, even if it does not feel like worship. It does not feel like worship because we feel so focused on the external: The new thing we need, the new trend we want to try, the next treat we have decided we deserve.
This pursuit of obtaining more too often shifts to a focus on consumerism. Over time, we lose the sense of culture, the sense of vision, that it originated from. It is no longer originality we seek, but a sense of status to set us ahead of the pack. That sense of status causes us to pursue jobs we do not like, to buy things we do not need, to impress people we do not like, all to make us more satisfied in the lives we were not supposed to live.
Let me give credit where credit is due: That last sentence in the paragraph above is not a concept I originated. It is a loose paraphrase of a line from a book called The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson. You should read it with an open mind. Hodgkinson points out the ridiculousness of our modern lives compared to the lifestyle that we used to live, that maybe we should still live today.
This sense of self becomes overwhelming selfishness sooner than we can realize. It forces us to start making choices that do not just benefit ourselves, but that benefit ourselves at the expense of others. Why should I give my time for someone else when that time could be spent on me? Why should I donate my money when that money could buy a new pair of shoes? Why should I hang out with that one friend who irks me sometimes when I could go impress my cool friends instead? Don’t lie to yourself, you know that friend. Maybe you are that friend sometimes, yet you benefit from the companionship of the friends that are irked by you.
Sometimes this selfishness defines how we live. Sometimes this selfishness becomes who we are. But if you are lucky, you reach a breaking point. A breaking point of guilt, and a lack of true satisfaction. Guilt for the distance between the life you live and the things you should do. A lack of satisfaction that comes from consumerism instead of collectivism, from a life spent obtaining instead of giving. A life of pursuits without purpose. And once you have reached that breaking point, should you be so blessed, you seek a way out of selfishness and turn your tide to selflessness.
You want to give. In every sense of what that word means, you want to give. In little ways to the people around you, and in bigger ways to people you have never met. You start questioning stupid purchases; stupid yet tempting purchases. You think of better ways to make your wallet work for the world. This does not always mean donations – although donating your money to a cause in need is a dutiful and honorable thing. Sometimes it is saving your money for your own future, or the future of a family you hope to have. Sometimes it means spending that money on a friend instead of yourself. Giving a gift is always greater than retail therapy.
It is not all about money or how you spend. What about the things that you do? When you go to work, what is your goal, besides earning your money? Are you only there to pass the hours, or to give it your all and help those around you? Even when your job feels stupid, a little bit of effort and a lot of positivity can make other people’s days feel better. And when you know you have made someone else’s day better, your own day may feel even better than theirs.
What about when the work day ends? Do you go home, crack a beer, and sit on the couch all night? What about your friends; do you call them and ask how they are doing? What about volunteer groups in your area who need help; have you checked in with them? What about your neighbor, or your relative, or someone you see in passing who could clearly use a hand? Have you helped a single one of them, or are you sipping your beer alone?
Heck, have you ever realized that you could help someone else by having a beer with them? How easy is that?!
Selflessness becomes self-serving faster than you could believe. The satisfaction you feel from supporting others before yourself is unspeakable, and it causes you to make one decision after another with others in mind. And soon, people start to see that. They know you are someone to be counted on, someone who puts the world first. When you put the world first, your world looks brighter. But all good things have a cost, and all debts must be paid.
You can only be selfless for so long until your river of giving runs glaringly dry. Sometimes you have donated all you can in your budget, but more often than not, that is not a limit we seem to struggle with. The limits we do struggle with are our time and energy.
We spend all of our time helping others, being there for others, that before we have had a chance to mentally recharge it is time for bed. Then we wake up, rinse, and repeat, before we have had a chance to be ourselves. We spend so much of our energy with others in mind, that we forget we need some energy too. We spend all of our time helping other people only to turn around and need help in return – selflessness becomes selfishness in the blink of an eye.
This does not mean you should keep quiet if you need help. Part of living with others in mind is the trust that others have your back too. More often than not, the first step to fixing something is to speak up, and ask for help. But so many times, we have the ability to help ourselves, but we ignore our own needs so long that we let those needs turn to problems that we cannot solve alone.
If you have ever flown on an airplane, remember what they tell you in case of emergency: Put on your own oxygen mask first before you help with anyone else’s. If you cannot breath, you cannot help anyone else catch their breath.
So we arrive at the time when another breaking point hits, and we realize the cycle has not ended. When we have exhausted ourselves on good efforts, it is time to save some of that effort for ourselves. Self-care is not selfish, in itself. It is part of survival. How many hungry people should you serve while your own stomach grumbles? How many friends should you see long after your social battery expires? How much of your money should you donate if you cannot pay next month’s rent? How many more examples of this can I point out to you?
We cannot save the world if we ourselves are in need of saving. We cannot be selfless if our needs are not first met, because in the end, we are no good to anyone that way. It sounds backwards, but it is true: If you do not care about yourself first, you cannot care for anyone else to your fullest potential.
Self-care can mean a lot of things. Sometimes self-care is a phone call with a loved one. Sometimes self-care is a massage, or a walk outside. Sometimes self-care is loud, other times self-care is silent. Sometimes self-care is wine, pasta, and Frank Sinatra. It’s different every day, and for every person in need. But whoever you are and whatever day you have had, figure out what you need, because you are worth it. And maybe more importantly, you are no good to others before you are good to yourself.
It does not mean you come before others in a sense of priority or hierarchy. On that same note, it does not mean others come before you. What it means, instead, is that we all matter in balance of each other. We all have needs that should be met. If you have the ability to take care of others, you have a responsibility to do so. If you have the ability to take care of yourself, though, you have even more of a responsibility to do that.
As all cycles do, we return to the top. Self-care can become selfishness when we forget what we are doing. We are not self-serving for the sake of pure pleasure. Rather, we find joy in balance with sacrifice, we find recovery in balance with reliability. But when we lose track of why we are taking care of ourselves, all we seek are treats for short term happiness. That short term happiness only gets shorter and shorter, meaning we need more and more selfish solutions. That is until we feel the need to repeat the cycle, again and again.
When we get really good at living, I think, the cycle moves so seamlessly that we no longer even recognize it as a cycle. When we feel selfish, we seek to help others. When we feel exhausted, we seek to help ourselves. When we have had enough self-care, our selfishness can restart the cycle. It will never be perfect because we will never be perfect. The point is not to be perfect, the point is to try. The point is to try to be more than ourselves without losing ourselves. The point is to give more to the world than we take from it, without forgetting that we still deserve some of it too. The point is to ride the cycle so gracefully that we do not even realize it is rotating.
It is okay to be selfish sometimes. It is okay to not feel like being selfless. And sometimes the closest we can come to self-care is to acknowledge that it is an area we are lacking in. It is okay to not be okay, that is part of what makes us human. But in recognizing our shortcomings, and the fact that we know we can do better, we show the true power of the human spirit: The power of acknowledging that our existence goes beyond our own survival. The power that we can impact far more than our own immediate life, without letting go of that life. The power of the Self-Cycle.