Balcing Selflessness With Selfishness

Gemma Steele on why it's okay to be selfish every once in a while.

There was a time when you were a blank canvas. A time before the long tendrils of life pushed and prodded you, drained you of your childhood exuberance and manipulated you into adulthood. For nothing but a mere second, we are unblemished: naked, not just physically, but mentally too. And then we start to learn. Like some sort of superpowered vacuum-sponge hybrid, we absorb any and every lesson we can. Some lessons are instinctual: we’re born with a predisposition to eat, sleep, breathe, (and repeat). Other lessons are picked up through imitation, like learning that chairs are for sitting on, or that the weather is always, always a reliable topic of conversation. Then we have explicit lessons. That is, lessons that are taught with the good intention of teaching.

‘Treat others how you would like to be treated’ is probably one of the first explicit lessons children are taught. It’s woven into children’s books; it’s the foundation of almost every major religion; it’s even frequently referred to as the ‘golden rule’, yet I wish it wasn’t.

It’s not that I don’t believe in this ‘golden rule’. It holds generosity, compassion and altruism at its core, so it’s fairly easy to get on board with. Even admitting my disagreement of such an agreeable, altruistic rule summons such feelings of guilt. I promise I’m not evil. I wouldn’t say I’m unkind or uncompassionate. In fact, I only disagree with the golden rule because I’ve absent-mindedly followed it my whole life.

Imagery by Joseph Marchant

That’s the darker side of the golden rule: it conditions us to prioritise the feelings of others over our own.”

I don’t think I’d be able to tell you how many times I’ve nonchalantly brushed off the question of ‘how are you’: the number of times I said I was fine when I wasn’t, not because I didn’t want to talk about it, and not because I felt I couldn’t talk about it, but because my want to treat others well led me to prioritise that person’s time, energy and comfort over my own. In the name of generosity, I tethered an anchor to my feelings and sunk them deep inside me; I left them to fester.

That’s the darker side of the golden rule: it conditions us to prioritise the feelings of others over our own. That’s fine in moderation, but when it’s glorified in isolation, we don’t see that it can be as detrimental as it is helpful. We need to make selfishness an explicit lesson: we need to balance selflessness with selfishness.

Naturally, we assume that the antithesis of something good is something bad. Heaven has hell, sunshine has rain, optimism has pessimism and selflessness has selfishness. It’s a somewhat natural thought process that is aggravated and perpetuated by societal conditioning. The ‘golden rule’ has cast selfishness as the villain and now, even the word ‘selfish’ has been condemned as a most scathing insult.

The golden rule thrives off of two human emotional processes. Firstly, we enjoy feeling cared for, feeling well treated. Secondly, and most detrimentally, we enjoy feeling appreciated when we treat other people well. More still, we ache for it. The problem is that this feeling of appreciation is conditional. When you treat others well, the gratification isn’t guaranteed. So many people become enslaved by this golden rule, tirelessly mining for a fleeting feeling. Treating others how you’d like to be treated encourages dependence on relationships; be them familial, situational, platonic or romantic. It is, in essence, the thief of independence. Perhaps that’s why so many people found the pandemic so cavernous and challenging. Confined to our own houses and homes, we were limited on which others we could treat well, limited on whose gratitude we could feast on… so we went hungry.

Humans are naturally social characters, but in this age, we’re constantly being told what we need, from human dependence to technological dependence to consumeristic dependence. We’re conditioned to ‘need’ so much that we forget the capacity of our own mind and body, our own power. We depend on our individual bodies to run marathons, climb mountains, write novels, discover disease cures, yet we can’t depend on ourselves for our own contentment.

How can we yearn to be appreciated by others but clam up at the thought of appreciating ourselves? It’s an illogical order. Think of a safety procedure on an aeroplane, the one you’d find written on a dog-eared piece of card in your seat’s magazine holder. It stipulates that, in the event of an emergency, you should put on your own oxygen mask before you help children, companions or others with theirs. We should learn to treat ourselves well before we begin to treat others well. You would struggle to teach French if you didn’t know a word of it yourself. Treating yourself well primes you with the tools to treat others better. To quote every tacky gossip magazine agony aunt ever, ‘you can’t love someone until you love yourself’.

Treating others how you want to be treated leaves too much room for interpretation. It’s almost egotistical to assume that how you want to be treated will suit someone else. In the cheesiest of analogies, if there was an initiative that asked you to give a friend the best cheese, I would give a camembert, but I would be thoroughly disappointed (if not a little insulted) if someone gave me a mild cheddar. When we know how we want to be treated, why would we relinquish total control of that? It’s the moral equivalent of ‘it’s the thought that counts’. Presents are almost always given with good intentions, but that doesn’t make the sweater that your nan knitted you any less itchy, and it definitely doesn’t make the dead mouse that your cat brought you any less disgusting. Treating others well is certainly kind, thoughtful and compassionate, but treating yourself well is certainly beneficial and proactive as well.

Treating others how you would like to be treated is exclusionary too. It provides no infrastructure that ensures everyone gets treated: well or at all. Treating others well is almost an unnecessary, sketchy middle man that makes the whole process more complicated, less reliable and less effective. How could it be simplified? By treating yourself well.

But even the golden rule only talks about your own treatment as a hypothetical situation. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. It conditions us to see our own good treatment as slightly unattainable, a theory rather than a reality. When we fail to examine the way we are treated in real, concrete terms, we starve ourselves of the tools we need to right it. Perhaps we do want to treat ourselves well, but the problem is that we don’t know how.

Treating ourselves neutrally would be a step in the right direction. It’s not only that we don’t treat ourselves well, it’s that we treat ourselves badly. If the rule was ‘treat others how you treat yourself,’ then civilisation would descend into anarchy. I regularly see the consequences of selflessness materialise in my own life. In the pressure-ridden throes of the modelling industry, I would compliment other models as if compliments were the only words I knew. Yet when I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t find peace, let alone compliments. All I could find was resentment. I was the same height and measurements as those other models. I had long blonde hair, blue eyes and a strong bone structure like most of them too. But still, I looked at them and saw beauty... I looked at myself and saw nothing more than inadequacy and mediocrity. The more I built other people up, the more hollow and empty I became.

Entrepreneur and influencer Grace Beverley detailed a similar attitude in Scarlet Curtis’ anthology, It’s Not Okay To Feel Blue. She recalled getting out of social engagements by claiming it was her ‘friend’ that needed support and compassion when, in reality, it was her. It was not the subject of the issue that she struggled with, she struggled with the fact that she was the subject of the issue. I get that. Admitting that you need to take time to care for yourself instigates two worries. First is that people might think you’re self-centred and selfish, and the second is that the person you admit your struggle to might worry and then you’ve compromised their comfort too. These worries ensure that caring for yourself carries a guilt-ridden sense of indulgence that prevents it from feeling as good as it should have anyway. It becomes, in essence, not that worth it.

This isn’t a takedown of compassion and selflessness. If we didn’t think of others and only thought of ourselves, we wouldn’t collaborate, progress or share. It’s about striking a balance between the two, combatting the years of golden rule-oriented conditioning by ramming the perks of selfishness down your throat. The scales have been so heavily weighted toward selflessness that there needs to be a hell of a lot of proselfishness-promo to rebalance them.

In the last decade, the self-care and wellness industry has grown exponentially. People are recognising that they need to treat themselves better but it has gotten irrefutably tangled and knotted with consumerist brainwashing. Truly treating yourself well will not come from a £1.50 sachet of facemask, and it won’t come from anything with luxury in its name either. As Pandora Sykes explains in her essay collection, How Do I Know I’m Doing it Right, self-care is just ‘a seven-chakra bandaid to cover our fears, desires and unedifying habits’. We need to normalise selfishness, not its wishy-washy, more attractive cousin called self-care, but it’s unadulterated, unashamed and brazen self, wholly focussed on treating yourself well. Self-care is just selfishness made palatable for the comfort of other people.

Learning to be selfish when you’ve been taught to be anything but selfish. It’s an intimidating standpoint to finish a self-improvement article at, with years of conditioning to reverse. Plus, selfishness only helps yourself. When you’ve been trained to serve others and ignore yourself, there can be very little acceptable incentive to entirely subvert your behaviour. However, selfishness and selflessness are not binary opposites. They require the same emotions; they have the same genetic makeup. They both revolve around generosity, compassion and kindness: their only difference is the direction in which those emotions are sent.

So, why don’t we stop thinking about golden rules and start thinking of ourselves as golden people?