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SELFISHNESS, UNIVERSAL EMPATHY, AND YOUR 20’S

Is it Actually Bad to Be Selfish?

written by Melissa Boberg | photographed by Chika Okoye | designed by Emily Snisarenko

I am not a statistician, but I would bet that you’d be hard-pressed to fnd any college student who has not heard the cliche that “college is the best four years of your life.” Even though this advice seems easily ignorable given the relative circumstances of individual life, it is still indicative of how people, especially of older generations, view the late-teenage-to-early-twenties phase of life. Connected to this is another cliche common in cultural discourse: “Your twenties is your time to be selfsh.” Naturally, this leads to the conclusion that being in college and/or being in your twenties is supposed to be the time of your life—because you are given the freedom with which to be selfsh. My question then becomes: if being selfsh yields such positive results on our personal well-being, why should we ever stop being selfsh?

Primarily, it is worth delving into what is meant by the advice that your twenties are about selfshness. I fnd this to be good-natured and genuinely helpful advice, which can be applied to concepts like relationships and exploration of passions. You should explore your passions and put yourself frst, without changing your plans for the maintenance of a relationship or the beneft of another person. (See: Topanga not going to Yale because of Cory.)

However, there is an expiration date on this—and there comes a point at which you are supposed to become more focused on things like fnancial stability, providing for others, et cetera. Also, this “expiration date” is wildly inconsistent; some people are born into or placed into circumstances where this period of selfshness is never granted, while others are given the chance to think exclusively about themselves for the entirety of their lives. (See: Donald Trump.)

In a way which is both hypocritical and not shocking, there are a lot of factors which play into whether or not it is permissible for a person outside of their twenties (or even oftentimes in/before their twenties) to behave selfshly. For example, stories like Wolf of Wall Street are held (by some) to an iconic status, for their depictions of ruthless economic pursuit. So, being selfsh is taboo for some people, whereas others are celebrated for being selfsh not only in a sense of self-

prioritization, but also in a sense of exploiting others around them with no regard. While it seems too obvious to even mention, it is worth keeping in mind that stories of grand-scale selfshness like this would not be told, nor would they traditionally occur at such a level, about people who are not men.

It seems to unfold in a sort of paradox culturally: it is good to be selfsh to a point, until you are supposed to be responsible for a partner/family/etc., in which case you only have to be presently responsible for them if you meet certain criteria of gender/economics/ etc. From my perspective, even if we were all socially able to be selfsh without regard, there is a level of selfshness which steps beyond a threshold of moral permissibility. In my opinion, it is beautiful and freeing for a person to follow their own intuitions, seek out their place in the world, and believe in themselves unapologetically. However, this level of selfshness is not the same as exploiting others, occupying the mindset that your experience of the world is the only one or is somehow worth more, and relinquishing yourself of personal/ social responsibility. So, attempting to break free of the boundaries of cultural defnition, how can we reach a point of selfshness as a healthy method of behavior?

While it might seem strange to negotiate how we feel about ourselves by starting with the external, I believe the frst step in reaching a point of healthy selfshness is to self-contextualize. Namely, the concept of universal empathy enables us to both love ourselves unabashedly and to love the other people with whom we share the world—to balance between prioritizing ourselves and caring for others.

Broadly, universal empathy refers to the practice of recognizing ourselves, or recognizing a familiar humanity, within everyone. Its opposite would be selective empathy, where we reserve our ability to sympathize or our willingness to help people whose experiences meet certain criteria or are familiar to our own. For a particularly relevant example, universal empathy would remind us that while we individually want to move into a post-Covid-19 world, we are not there yet and should not contribute to increasing the