Living For Others

Many societies are conditioning their respective members to basically live for others. Living for others involves doing things for the sake of gaining others' approval, being better than others, and other sorts of extrinsic motivations. I guess it works well (in theory) as a method of social control, but I personally believe that living for oneself will ultimately trump the concept of living for others.

I am not saying that one needs to be completely selfish and ignore the needs of others, or even to be a complete asshole to everyone else. While some modicum of charity and civility should be maintained for the benefit of all, the motivation for such actions should not be for the sake of one's public "face" (I'd look good doing this). Instead, I believe that rendering social good should be from one's own desire to benefit others (not from some fuzzy concept of "social good"), otherwise one can skip the step. "Doing good" with the implicit expectation of having it reciprocated in some way is a good recipe for disappointment: Even if others are feeling charitable, their charity might not fall on you.

The alternative is not to have society/community before self, but indeed to have self before all. I would say Love Yourself. It may sound selfish and self-centred, but I believe loving oneself is the root of love for everything else. As they say, being IN love is a weakness, but having love in YOURSELF is strength. Intrinsic motivators are incredibly powerful because nothing on the outside can shake them. If a teacher would suddenly choose to dislike me, I would still be motivated to work just as hard. If the teacher's negative bias were to cause my grades to suffer, I would still know that I did my best and the fault is not my own.

This is not to say that one should have blind faith in oneself. Blind faith is also a form of weakness in choosing to believe something regardless of the facts. If I did not do my best when studying, it would be foolishness to think that I did and therefore deserved my own grades. One also needs to recognize one's own weaknesses and to overcome them. When one can fully live for oneself, one is secure in one's own being, and can eventually get to doing things for others, because one is finally secure in the motivations for one's own actions.