I was watching the news this morning. How sad. My heart hurts. Our society is so driven by selfishness. Greed. Materialism. There is war. Children starving. People without homes. And what do we do as individuals? Blame. We blame the politicians. We blame other members of society. But, what about us? What are we doing? To help. To help build community. We all sit here. We watch the news. Hear the stories. But, we don’t do anything.
Our ‘must-have’ culture is damaging family life as materialism and a pervading sense of selfishness become the norm. We all want to work hard and have a reasonable lifestyle. But our society is out of balance. There are other values that are actually more important than our material well-being: the value of community, family, caring for other people, feeling connected to our children.
The widespread belief among society is that the prime duty of the individual is to make the most of their own life, rather than to contribute to the lives of others. Good citizenship and genuine neighbourliness are being overlooked and people are being ‘alienated by a selfish society’.
If everyone around you is behaving selfishly, if our culture and society tells us this is the norm, it can be difficult not to join in. It’s almost as if we think it’s a good thing to override our feelings and just work, work, work, and consume, consume, consume.
There are a lot of very caring people out there, people who support charities, volunteer and help their neighbours. People do these things not only because they’re worth doing but also because being part of that caring mentality gives you self-respect.
So in light of the messy world we live in. Lets step back. Contemplate. Think. It is a thousand times easier to notice the selfish behaviour and flaws in other people than it is to acknowledge them in ourselves. We need to change as individuals first.
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