The pursuit of self-mastery isn’t selfish. Becoming mighty enough to overcome challenges in our own lives gives us the skills to thrive in the modern age. Once we accomplish this, we can turn our attention to helping our loved ones and our community.
Our families and communities provide important benefits throughout our lives. By supporting them, we become stronger together, and we empower those around us to live positive lives. Unfortunately, doing so isn’t always easy. Our personal needs and desires stand in the way of offering that support to those around us. Burnout and isolation await those unable to support themselves, as they lose touch with those around them.
Creating a lifestyle where we can support others is an ideal that many aspire to. Not only does it add meaning to our own lives, but the legacy we leave behind inspires others to do the same.
Welcome to the Work Series – my thoughts on why gaining the power to choose which challenges we overcome allows us to create better lives for ourselves and others.
Why Should We Help Each Other?
The lives we enjoy today were built by the millions who came before us. Since time immemorial, humanity has come together to build things greater than what they could achieve alone. This allowed them to build communities, ideologies, and modes of government, all in the name of elevating each other.
We should help each other because it is our nature to do so.
We Become Stronger
Helping others allows us to share the best parts of ourselves. Oftentimes, this results in something more than the sum of its parts.
Humans can accomplish incredible feats when they come together. Nobody can build a skyscraper alone, let alone acquire and transport the materials to do so. Only by working together can we overcome the most difficult obstacles in our lives.
The strength of humanity comes from inclusion, support, and ingenuity. The emotional connections we forge with others through this support create deep and meaningful relationships. When crisis strikes, the support network we have created throughout our life and our work shield us against the damage of catastrophes.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “What brings no benefit to the hive brings no benefit to the bee.” This idea suggests that acting in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole cannot deliver us, as individuals, any real benefit. The only way to truly win is to work together with others towards a common good.
Be wary of ideologies that incite division. It is important to find people on the same journey as you, but doing so at the exclusion of others may divide and weaken you and those you care about.
Meaning
Helping our loved ones gives us purpose. It gives us instant feedback that the work we are doing matters.
I’ve shared my thoughts on work many times. In fact, my Work Series is dedicated to discussing it. Work refers to the challenges we overcome in our lives. Trading your time for money is work, as is caring for loved ones. Work is simply trading your time and attention towards overcoming a challenge of yourselves or others.
We experience dissatisfaction in our work when we feel as though that work does not have meaning. Left unchecked, this feeling manifests as despair, warping the psyche and rendering people unable to live life normally.
Doing meaningful, impactful work is how we stave off this despair.
When our time is occupied by work we are forced to take, it is easy for this despair to take hold. The pursuit of Financial Independence allows us to work towards a future where this isn’t our reality. However, this pursuit alone is not enough to create meaning in our lives – we must make genuine moves to do things that matter throughout our journey.
Leave a Legacy
Legacy isn’t just about being famous or being remembered. Legacy can be as simple as supporting others enough that they are inspired to in turn help others.
Helping your loved ones and community allows you to share your good fortune and strengths with others. This can create meaning not only in your life, but in the lives of others, which can in turn pull them out of despair. The people you help can then go on to help others, creating a positive feedback loop that extends far beyond the help you gave.
People remember all sorts of random things. Perhaps an interaction that seems inconsequential to you could be a treasured memory for someone else. There’s no way to know how your actions may be perceived by others, or how that person will be inspired by them.
Being virtuous, helping others, and being an inspiring person will leave a legacy to be proud of. A legacy much more powerful than others merely remembering your name.
What Stops You Helping Your Loved Ones?
It’s easy to see why helping our loved ones and our communities is important. We can stave off psychic damage, become powerful enough to make real change in the world, and inspire others to do the same. So what’s stopping us from helping others more?
We Don’t Have the Time
The simplest reason is that we don’t have the time to do so.
Modern life is a high intensity experience for most people. Work occupies the majority of our week, we numb ourselves with escapism in the evenings, and our weekends are filled with chores. The precious little time remaining is spent resting and preparing for the next week.
With vast proportions of the population experiencing challenges with rising costs of living, focusing on the needs or wants of others becomes challenging if not impossible.
It’s not that people don’t care about helping others. It’s that they can’t afford to.
Taking time away from our own lives to help others can leave us worse off. But if we don’t spend time helping our loved ones, we may find ourselves isolated from them. We must either allow our relationships or our own wellbeing to wither, which only worsens with time.
Solving the issue of time therefore becomes paramount to successfully helping our loved ones.
We’re Forced to Focus on Ourselves
Gaining mastery over our time is an important goal – arguably, the most important goal.
It frees us from mandatory work and allows us to become more efficient. Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff when pusuing this mastery: we focus on ourselves so much that we disregard the needs of others.
Pursuing self-mastery isn’t selfish in and of itself. After all, you may be learning new skills to earn a high income, which in turn allows you to work less and then better help those around you. The problem is that the pursuit of this can divert attention away from those you care about in the immediate term.
For instance, a promotion may result in you working more hours in the evening, leaving you with less time with your family. Your changing needs may necessitate you taking this work – even if your loved ones suffer in the short term.
It’s important to do things for ourselves. This is a big part of how we grow as people. But the prioritisation of personal goals, taken to its extreme, may have negative impacts on the people we care about.
Overwhelm
Life often has us reacting to multiple different stimuli at once. The needs of our body, mind, soul, finances, loved ones, our employer, and our communities all need to be balanced. And when one of these begins to falter, it’s a sign that the path you are on may not be sustainable.
Keeping every plate spinning successfully is a dream that few get to achieve. Perhaps you earn enough and have a good work environment, but you don’t have time for physical exercise and don’t visit your parents as much as you’d like. Alternatively, you may have a solid routine, but don’t have a community to enjoy your downtime with. Every lifestyle comes with some form of sacrifice. Ideally, we put ourselves in a position to choose what that sacrifice is.
You can think of these like attributes in a game. In a video game world, you have attributes like health, money, energy, mood, or hunger as examples. Problems arise when these attributes hit critically low levels, as they cause negative effects in other areas of your life.
For instance, low money means cutting expenditure on things you enjoy, lowering your mood and increasing stress. If an attribute is left low enough for long enough, they can cause long-lasting or even permanent negative effects. Using the same money example, a lack of funds may cause you to take out a high interest loan. The long term implications of taking out a high interest loan are obvious – you are forced to watch your wealth be destroyed, and you delay investment in your own future.
Trying to keep track of the needs of every aspect of your life is overwhelming. And when the burden of this becomes too great – when our lifes become too stressful – we burn out.
Burnout
The worst part about burnout is that it often makes us feel worse about our situation.
We feel guilty that we need help from ourselves and others, leaving us with more stress. The people we’ve been working hard to help suddenly find themselves as the helpers. This pile-on of stress during a time of crisis can make our situation even more dire. This is worse still if you find that nobody else is able to support you in the way that you need.
Living a life of balance and avoiding burning out therefore becomes essential. This not only keeps you healthy, but it allows you to best help those around you, as well as attract those people into your life.
How To Help Your Loved Ones & Community
There is much that stands between us and our ability to help others. Our base needs (and the time spent maintaining them) often prevent us from helping others as much as we might like.
Helping others requires dedicated action; it is a form of work. Doing things that matter to you and the people around you is one way in which you can Choose Work You Love. Allowing your work to become an expression of your love and talent unlocks deep meaning and purpose behind everything you do. That said, there are some considerations to note when pursuing this type of work:
Help Yourself Before Helping Others
If you’ve ever travelled on an aeroplane, you’ll be aware of the safety announcements that recommend you fit your own oxygen mask before helping others. The same is true for many things in life: it is difficult to help others effectively if you are incapable of providing for your own needs.
It may seem antithetical, but the best way to help others is to help yourself first. Take the time you need to build your life up in whatever way you need to. This may mean acquiring a well-paying job or stable housing. Once you have what you need to protect yourself, you can help to protect others as well.
This approach can be detrimental if taken too far. If your goal is too large, you risk becoming too absorbed in accomplishing it. This can become an obsession that takes over your life, and prevents you from taking necessary action in the present.
I found myself the victim of this when first pursuing Financial Independence. After discovering it was possible to never need to work again, I was hooked. I began diverting all excess funds into savings and investments while avoiding going out. My hobbies languished and I became increasingly isolated. It was only after burning out of my corporate career that I realised that a more sustainable approach was necessary for me to thrive. Thankfully, I now have much better relationship with money, and I’m able to use the free time I’ve created in my life to help others succeed as well.
Strike a balance between helping yourself and helping others. Find what enough means for you, attain it, and once you’re comfortable, help those around you.
Simplify Your Life
The information overload we experience in our lives isn’t just visual or digital. It permeates every aspect of our lives, including our spending habits. This, combined with the effects of entropy, cause our home lives to descend into chaos. The only way for us to overcome this is by taking deliberate action to simplify our lives.
You can simplify in a variety of different ways. Reducing your consumption is a good way to start, and applies to more than just the money you spend. You may also wish to declutter and keep your home tidy. Whether you become hardcore minimalist or just need to tidy up, this act free up your time and space for things that matter more to you.
Your digital diet – the content you consume – also has an impact on your mood. Avoid consuming things that incite undesireable feelings within you. Simplification comes from removing undesireable aspects and keeping them out of your life, then avoiding filling it with more junk.
Your home, your mind, and your body should be sanctuaries. Treat them as such, and be intentional about what you allow into your life.
Prioritise Your Relationships
The practice of helping our loved ones isn’t something we should wait to do. It’s an ideal we need to live by.
Ensure you dedicate enough time to the people you care about. It’s easy to let your personal goals, your career, or bad excuses stop you from making the effort. If you want to spend time with people that matter to you, acknowledge that it requires some amount of focus, effort, or work. Then do the work.
Everything from friendships to families, communities or relationships involves some sort of work to maintain. Interacting with people is not effortless, and it takes time and energy away from other things that matter to you. This makes it essential for you to choose relationships that matter to you, and dedicate time to making them the best they can be.
Communicate effectively, and be willing to block out time to support those you care about. Offer support to those around you that need it, but also be willing to accept support from them. While we may strive to become mighty in our day to day lives, we cannot achieve this all the time. Good friendships and strong communities will support you if needed – especially if you were the one who helped them in the past.
Closing
Helping our loved ones and our communities is something that I feel has become more difficult in recent times. Cost of living pressures, combined with a working culture that necessites both partners working, makes it difficult to help ourselves, let alone others. It’s why my personal philosophy focuses so strongly on finances: any modern philosophy has to.
Solving the finances problem gives you the ability to pursue things that matter more to you. Personal goals and helping others become our new priorities, and the benefits of helping others help you achieve those goals.
By building stability and security into our lives, we can turn our attention to helping our loved ones. Your future, the future of those you care about, and the future of those who come after you rest on your shoulders. Stepping into the shoes of those who built the world before us is the best way to honour their legacy and create our own.
Thank you for reading.
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