change your mind.

"If you think taking care of yourself is selfish, change your mind. If you don't, you're simply ducking your responsibilities." - Ann Richards

Man has very little choice but to be the center of his own world, no matter how he may delude himself into thinking he is (or is even capable of) putting others first. Or as Jonathan Rhys Meyers puts it, "My whole world revolves around Jonathan Rhys Meyers."

In all fairness, is that really a statement of vanity, or just a harsh, universal truth?

It's at the center of the existential quandary. Do we have to feel guilty that me is all we know, that we are the first we consider in everything, if only for a split second, before accounting for others? No matter how wordly one is, "me" is all they can ever know — there is precisely nothing that one hasn't said, done, seen, and felt through his or her own window on life. Everything you know has been assimilated through your personal filter; every move you make is motivated by your own hierarchy of priorities, which priorities are postcursors of your base needs and desires. You, your, you, your, your.

Even if one of those priorities is taking care of others, you put it on your personal list; generosity and consideration are acts of self-preservation. You can't escape your own biases, your own inner dialogue, the guiding hand of your agendas, your preferences, and that gnawing (very noisily gnawing) awareness of your own needs. Telling yourself that you ever set those parameters aside is kidding yourself, and underestimating the power of your subconscious and base instincts.
I'm forever reminding myself that
1) self-perpetuation is one of the human animal's most primal instincts — second only to (and hand-in-hand with) the instinct to reproduce, which we can't bloody well do if we don't make sure we're here to do it.*
and
2) everyone else is doing it. I fend for myself. You fend for yourself. We share and we cooperate, but we always have one eye on our own asses. I fend only for myself when it's all my resources will allow, and when there's an excess of resources, I fend for myself and help others. The myself sure as shit is never left out of the equation.

Disparity in resources is responsible for the socio-economic inequality which fuels our guilt at fending for ourselves instead of the less fortunate — but everyone, in all echelons, has to be me-first, then others-if-I-have-the-resources-and-energy. You starving, unfulfilled, unsheltered, alone, desperate and ill because you relinquished your every last ounce of resource makes you a fool, not an altruist.

That hubris is a little extreme, but it stands that you have to think of yourself if you're ever going to be in a state to think of others. Whether interested in that or not, the individual can't choose to fully opt out of self-centeredness. Each man's own mind is its own first stop on its way to anything else. Whether you choose to torture yourself by being ashamed of it is, clearly, optional.



*And jesus we do make sure we're here to do it, and while we're here, we do it like bunnies, and when we're not doing it, we pantomime doing it. And you know bunnies aren't feeling any guilt over their selfish priorities: Stay alive, diddle other bunnies, continue to stay alive so I can diddle more bunnies.