Normalizing selfishness

“I don’t think I spoke to a single person who believed in setting personal goals,” he said. “But 100 percent of the people I spoke to wanted to solve a problem for the many. It doesn’t matter how you give each day. It doesn’t even matter how much. But everyone wanted to give and eventually they were given back.

We’re not born to be selfish. And the economics of living in community make it clear that short-term hustle rarely benefits anyone. But when you’re flailing and looking for something (anything) to stand on, there’s pressure to choose the selfish path.

These phenomena aren’t matters of indifference or bad taste. This is what arises from our increasingly unnatural experience of community, of culture, of public life, of identity, of bodies in space.

Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization.

Over the next few years I collected data to suggest that we have seen a broad shift from a culture of humility to the culture of what you might call the Big Me, from a culture that encouraged people to think humbly of themselves to a culture that encouraged people to see themselves as the center of the universe.