Healthy selfishness exists and does not hurt anyone.
But what is really healthy selfishness? It is that "need" that allows us to fully live our dimension without having to depend on someone or something. Unfortunately, we are living in a society where from the smallest we are inculcated the custom to focus more on others and less and less on ourselves. So we become big and many of our problems, our "disturbances" such as anxiety and fear, come from the fact that we consider someone or something as the most important phenomenon of our lives. Healthy selfishness, however, stimulates us to assume the responsibility of our life and not to depend on others. Through it we can acquire the ability to take care of us, without delegating to other choices and satisfaction of our own needs.
Healthy egoism thus becomes an art, a craft, to carry on a work, a work that we can call "self-care", that is to take care of oneself, to learn to orient our gaze towards the interior, towards The hidden part of the soul. Because within us lies our essence, that energy that shapes our inner and outer image and which nourishes the process of transformation into new forms of personal fulfillment. But without a healthy ego we can not (in this society!) Because it's easy to guess, just look at the world around us to see how many people wear the mask of altruism to show good and hide what is really, resulting in a hypocritical behavior.
A healthy selfishness, good, becomes the possibility of choosing to freely and arbitrarily give up that person or something that constantly requires our attention, our presence, our energy; But not only, healthy selfishness allows us to voluntarily free ourselves from everything that creates an attachment-whether mental, physical or emotional, does not matter. Again, healthy selfishness makes us able to free ourselves from guilty feelings towards some people who are using our own guilt to keep us below a certain level of energy, which represents that safe limit that does not grow us either be happy. But above all, with healthy selfishness, the term "I must" disappears and is replaced by "I want" because, as good Carl Gustav Jung said, "every life that has not been lived represents a destructive and irreversible power that operates silently but ruthlessly . ".
The beginning of healthy selfishness coincides with that moment of our life in which we "wake up", and we realize that after doing everything we "want" we are in front of a crossroads: either we, either they. Either to continue to live for others-that is, the society, the family, the tradition or the spiritual group that we chose, [usually, we realize that we do not live our "life" when we are persuaded by a perpetual sense of anger, disappointment, dissatisfaction and compression, from a constant feeling of feeling slow, as if walking in a muddy swamp] either to live by our own rules.
Therefore, we leave aside the common morality and the usual prejudices about selfishness, which is only labeled as a form of greed, as a defect that is to be control oneself and corrected. Selfishness has its "healthy" part, the part that allows it to take care of itself, to hear only its own indications that flow from the mind, moving away from the common way of thinking.
Healthy selfishness, not only is not condemnable, but it is advisable.
“It's not my job to make you happy. It's your job to learn that only those who quit selfishly seeking their own happiness find it.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
written by Corina Abdulahm Negura
