Millennial's Monologue: Secret Dramas in Our Hearts & Souls

Question #9: Is it wrong to be selfish?

Question #9: Is it wrong to be selfish? 

When I was a teenager, I was not happy with who I was and everything I did was motivated by a desire to secure a tangible basis for my self-esteem.  I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel insecure, bored, or exhausted, and the only thing that kept me going was the mental image of what I’d like to become—a glamorous woman in stiletto heels and a Theory suit with a high-powered job in finance.  I wanted to become independent, powerful, and beautiful—a total opposite of how I saw myself at the time.  I was a self-conscious immigrant kid in a prestigious New England boarding school full of snobbish and cool classmates.   

More often than I’d like to admit, I relied on a pretty heavy dose of narcissism and self-delusion to power through hardships.  Indeed, I was driven by a desire to earn my self-respect as well as the belief that it is nobody else’s job but mine to work hard and develop my potential.  The idea of helping out the less fortunate or engaging in the high level thinking of “What is the purpose of life?” seemed like a luxury I could not afford.   I was extremely busy, just trying to stay above the water and not get drowned.  As I struggled to ace one exam after another, my days were characterized by a violent fluctuation between self-loathing and self-indulgence.  

Sometime in my early twenties, however, I realized that people don’t really care about how attractive or accomplished I am.  They are busy thinking about themselves!  I also realized that the world does not exist to tend to my every need, nor to boost my ego, nor to  make me feel content and fulfilled.  This sounds obvious and straightforward, but at the time, it was a huge revelation, the kind of insight that turned my mental world upside down.  Then, I slowly became aware of my yearning to be anchored in something bigger than myself.  I realized how lonely and lost I’ve been all along. If my life were all about achieving the things on my checklist of self-improvement, I would always be that pathetic narcissist desperately looking for affection and affirmation from other people.  And guess what?  I would be miserable.  

At the height of my quarter-life crisis, nothing really made that much sense anymore but I became convicted of two things.  First, I don’t want the dominant narrative of my life to be “Kristen spent her lifetime trying to become the prettiest, smartest, most popular person she could be and then, she died.”  Second, I became convinced that most famous people these days inadvertently hurt a lot of people.  Their success breeds discontentment, restlessness, and bitterness; their beauty and designer wardrobe make young girls feel inadequate and unattractive.  It’s a sad reality that so many people use their gifts from God to torment other people. 

But is it even possible to escape this fate, given my instinctual urge to self-glorify?  Can I somehow realign my heart from self-centered to other-centered?  Not knowing how to go about this seemingly monumental task, I started praying.  I prayed out of desperation because I felt a moral revulsion at the kind of person I’d become.  In the Gospels, what I saw was a simple but radical promise—our heart is naturally selfish but if we repent and ask, it will become capable of love, true love.  I don’t need to deserve that kind of heart in order to have it.  God has the redemptive power to deflate and heal our sensitive, over-bloated ego, which grants us peace with ourselves and with each other.  When I went to church, a middle-aged pastor told me it’s not my job to plant a divine seed of true love in a human heart; my job is simply to receive and to spread.  This reasoning seemed both confusing and sensible.  

Against this reality, what then does it mean to have a meaningful life?  We all pass away and die, but the values and ideas that we once cherished and lived out seem to persist after our deaths.  Not only in the hearts and minds of our future children, but in the invisible, normative sphere of the world.  Some people call it “culture,” others call it “Zeitgeist” or the “spirit of our era.”  And that’s perhaps why every word we utter matters, and every value system we either reject or embrace matters.  That’s how we leave imprints during our brief stay on earth.