A lot of gurus recommend being selfless as a great way to achieve happiness and meaning. Selflessness, in actuality, is one of the greatest curse you can give your own life. Stop being selfless. It is destroying your life.
If you kill your desires and try to find happiness, it’s a lost and painful road and you will never be happy.
The world is run by fools, especially in the religious world who keep saying that selfishness is a bad thing. Selfishness is not a bad thing. It is selflessness that sucks. It is the selfless people who are making the world manipulative and sad place.
When you are selfless you make people feel you are obliging them for whatever you are doing for them. You end up burdening their life and your life as well. It is high time you get off from the high horse of selflessness, not just for the sake of others, but for the sake of your own happiness.
Here are a bunch of reasons you should consider to stop being selfless for good.
1. Selflessness is painful
Consider this. It is painful to be selfless. It means you are sacrificing your own joy for the sake of others. How is that supposed to make you happy at all? If you sacrifice your own feelings for others, your feelings will haunt you. Others don’t live inside of your feelings do. If you sacrifice your joy, you will not be happy.
2. It is a façade
The while idea of selflessness is a painful façade for the world. You somehow tell others that you are being selfless for them and they are supposed to feel good about that? How? You are already putting an emotional burden on them.
It is a façade which is not even true since nobody can really be selfless. We can’t quite move away from our self, no matter how hard we try-making the while idea of selflessness a pretentious fraud.
3. It is good to be selfish
When you are selfish, you put your joy before anyone else’s joy. That makes people free to be with you because they know that you are not doing them a favor but you are with them because you want to be with them.
Even love is selfish because the lover does the loved because he/she wants to love. There is nothing selfless about love.
4. Selflessness is a big pretense
The truth is nobody really is selfless. Parents do not do a favour in kids by reproducing them. They choose to have kids because it makes their own lives more meaningful. People who do charity do it because it makes them feel good about themselves. People have friends because it makes their life better. We do not only have the need to be loved. We also have a need to love.
Therefore, all acts are inherently selfish, and only marked or labelled as selfless. It is not even a healthy joke. Whatever people do, they really do it for themselves, and not for anyone else.
5. Sacrifice is one of the worst words in language
People talk about sacrificing as if it is something to be proud of. If you sacrifice your dreams for someone in the cause of selflessness, you will hold the grudge for the rest of your life. You will cause pain to them and to yourself by reminding themselves that they are the source of your pain because they are the reason you sacrificed your dreams for. It is a vicious circle that doesn’t end.
Do not sacrifice your dreams and happiness for anyone. If you do, you will destroy two lives- theirs and yours.
6. Read the works of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand continues to be my favorite author who wrote multiple books. Her philosophy is called objectivism. Rand described Objectivism as the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
The work of Ayn Rand taught me how to prioritize my happiness over anything else in life why the individual is the most important unit in the happiness of the society. The collective happiness of the society cannot be anything other than the happiness of its individuals.
7. Selflessness prepares you for a life blaming others
If you espouse selflessness, you will end up blaming someone or the other for your lack of joy. Your life will definitely lack joy because you will keep sacrificing yourself in the name of your idealistic pursuit of a worthless goal.
If you are selfish and take responsibility for your happiness, you will end up holding no one but yourself accountable for your life and will have no one to blame, when things go wrong.
8. Only selfishness can bring you contentment
There is no way you can be content and poised in life if you give away the things and emotions that you value the most in the name of sacrifice and selflessness. You must preserve what you value and care about. Those are the things that would bring you contentment and lasting joy.
9. Even when you do things for others, you are not being selfless
This is the most important lesson you need to imbibe. There are countless articles on the internet on how to be selfless and imbibe a selflessness attitude.
You do not need a selfless attitude to be good to others. When you are good to others, you feel good yourself and that is what you truly earn in the process. You are doing it for yourself. You are not doing it for others. When you tell people that you did it for them and it is selflessness, it is hypocrisy, which is self-defeating.
10. You live life for yourself. Simple as that
Whatever you do in life, you do it for yourself.
You study, so you will learn.
When you buy your girlfriend flowers, so she is happy –> so you feel happy
If you love your parents –> so you feel happy
You work hard to get a promotion so you can buy a house for the family –> so, you feel you have achieved something worthwhile.
Everything that you do, you it for yourself. Stop being selfless because you already are selfish, and it is okay.
Selfishness is a good thing
To conclude, selfishness, is not a curse. Selflessness is a fallacy which too many gullible people have bought into. As human beings, we do not live lives selflessly. We live lives selfishly and that is how it should be. Everything that we do for others comes back to create a joyful feeling for us. Love is selfish and so is happiness. Preserve it like that. Selfless is a fallacious emotional burden for everyone involved. Stop being selfless today!
In fact, take the oath that John Galt, the lead protagonist in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged takes for his life. The pledge is this: I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Thank you for reading.
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I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.
Love,
Amarvani
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