Selfless or selfish?

“Do what you love and let it kill you.” – Charles Bukowski

Would you rather experience ultimate life satisfaction or be able to sustain yourself, if self sustenance meant that you couldn’t be satisfied with your life the way you want to? The scenarios where we can have both ideal life sustenance and ultimate satisfaction are very rare to find and to those who have them, I salute with the highest stature.

Bukowski, one of my favorite writers, wrote, “do what you love and let it kill you” and I think that this phrase carries so much weight in the idea that following our passions doesn’t always result in what most people’s ideal life looks like. ‘Most people’ being our own family, friends and in large, the society we live in. Some are keener on achieving that ‘ideal standard of living’ and that may be what gives them life satisfaction and that’s okay; while the rest can strive for life satisfaction with one penny a day type of life. It all boils down to whether we can sleep dreaming about running through hay fields in dungarees and rosy cheeks or whether we dream the type of dreams where the ground keeps falling beneath us and we can’t stop running.

I think some would say that that’s just the way life works; that we can’t always have what we want but I choose to stand on the other side because I believe that we always have a choice even though that decision can be the most difficult one to make.

Like how we need the day to have the night or how you need the silence to know sound, and how it takes some darkness to know the light; these opposing entities exist to make us see the black and white in everything. Likewise, we always have the ones who accept things as they come and the ones who decide to make choices. In this way sometimes we want more choices when we don’t have them and when we have too many, we wish for less. Somehow we always want what we don’t have and for that, I say, we always have a choice to either accept that we can’t have it or do something and create a change to get what you want.

Some may say that this philosophy is selfish because we are draining our blood, sweat and tears for something that’s truly and solely for us; but for the self it’s a selfless deed –for selflessly loving ourselves so much that we are ready to do something so earnestly, without knowing fatigue to achieve the end goal. Having options is almost always a good thing but sometimes we find ourselves in complex dilemmas throughout the different decisions we make in our lifetimes.  

In support, I would like to give a very real example- If one day you were faced with the decision to accept the job of your dreams but far away from home and family; or to stay close to home and reject the job of your dreams but maybe get a stable job near home, with family. To make this an even more intricate dilemma, if you had ailing parents or parents who have a proneness to fall suddenly ill or who are often times in need of medical attention, what would your decision be?

I guess the scenario here would be applicable specifically to homes with good parent-child relationships though there exists even more complicated relationships between parents and their off-springs but that’s another blog altogether!

What I’m trying to convey is that no matter what decision you make, there will always be a good and bad side to it from all perspectives. For instance, you take the job and move away from home, then for you, it’s a selfless deed to yourself to carry the burden and heartache of leaving your family behind to pursue your dreams probably to support your family in the future. While people see it as a selfish deed because “you are ungrateful and don’t love your parents who have supported you your whole life.” In the other instance, if you don’t take the job, you’re crazy! You lost the opportunity of a lifetime! J While there may be people who appreciate your decision to reject the job, I think that the lamentations of our parents will supersede our sacrifices, perhaps being reminded on the daily and having to relive that for the rest of our lives. This is the narrative that has been heard and listened to for a lot of us.

So I guess achieving life goals and ultimately, life satisfaction is a selfless or selfish deed depending on the perspective of the self and the outsiders’ view of the self. Although people talk vigorously that we should turn a deaf ear to opinions and views of others and believe in not letting outside opinions hamper our own decisions, we all know that these words tend to stay in our minds; they fester subconsciously and affect our decisions, sometimes without our knowledge. The end goal of this blog is just to let you readers know that you’re not alone in feeling buried alive 6 ft under dilemmas or maybe just to validate that I’M not the only one!!