We live our life for Others.

From a lifetime of pondering, that’s my great reveal.

The right question is not, “How am I doing – for myself?” but “How am I doing – for Others?”

This discovery barreled into me recently with the force of revelation. My zeal to share it is white-hot. Let me try to explain why.

Privileged Western society, my native milieu, preached the opposite since the start of the twentieth century. With Freud and modernist art and the alleviation of practical imperatives, the focus of thinkers, makers, and healers pivoted to ME. How am I feeling? Self seized the center of attention: not, how does my life advantage Others but ME, ME, ME. Our responsibility, we were taught, was to self-actualize: MY career, MY fulfillment. Winning came to mean getting – more and more and more.

These generalizations are cartoonishly broad but that’s the way with prophetic diction. Yes, there were exceptions, modifications, good people in all periods, no one-size-fits-all. But a description of direction, trends, the Weltanschauung resists lawyerly precision.

The discovery of Self began with the Renaissance and Reformation; Harold Bloom argues it began with Shakespeare (as did so much). Before then, society’s focus was on the tribe or, for Christianity, on mankind, not on ME. Hamlet, two Richards, Lear, commenced a long deep dive into the endless mystery of ME. A child of my age, I’ve spent my life exploring who I am and how I got this way. As beloved Becca put it, “You’ve spent your life looking for yourself, Dad, and you’re halfway there.”

There’s no gainsaying the fascination of individual evolution. Neither is self-neglect sensible. The self is a plant which must be nursed, nourished, trained, protected to achieve its potential and bear fruit. To serve our kind we must care for ourselves.

But a hale, whole self ought to be our means not our end. We must be strong and capable to do good for Others. We must measure success not by how we feel but by how we’ve served. The saint, teacher, healer, maker, soldier are not society’s also-rans, assigned to pathetic status by a materialistic culture, but our heroes and exemplars, our most not our least.

Relentless focus on Self has made contemporary privileged society dissatisfied and sad, for, in Gertrude Stein’s lasting phrase, “there is no there there.” Call it the ouroboros mistake: spend your life eating your own tail, you never get to an end. Our only dependable gratification is the gratitude of Others. Only when an Other blesses me, do I feel blest.

My prep school’s motto, borrowed from Saint Augustine, was “Cui servire est regnare” – “to serve is to rule.” Who gives their all to a lofty ideal gets all in return. Selflessness brings self-fulfillment. Measure your life against this standard and – for most – the moral calculus recomputes. One asks not, “What am I getting from life?” but “What am I giving to the lives around me?” Not “How am I feeling?” but “How are you feeling?”

The contest for personal gain has blinded moderns to this obvious truth: the wealth you can count is not the wealth that counts. So Thoreau whispered to me half a century ago, which it’s taken me a lifetime to fathom. So the saints winked to me in Rome – and the Makers I hold dear, who gave their lives to make beauty for Others. Our nation is teetering, I’m convinced, because we’ve lost sight of this essential truth.

How do we repair our ways? The only way we can. One choice, one moment, one life at a time. And pray.