Living for others

There is another measure of morality: whether you tend to live for yourself or for others. If you live mostly for yourself, you have little morality. If you live mostly for others, you have a lot.

Selfishness, though, is a natural instinct in every creature. Everyone wants first to do what benefits themselves. We see to it that we are fed and warm, and only then think of other people. Left alone without education, that instinct steers our behavior and thoughts into a life with little morality. Only through education and the awakening of wisdom do we push back against selfishness and learn to live for others.

A father pretends to sip his drink and chat about this and that, waiting for his children to finish so he can eat whatever is left. Someone gives up buying a new motorbike and uses the money saved for it to help a neighbor struck by disaster. Work is over and the party is about to start, but you feel sorry for the old man who has been waiting so long, so you stay late to sort out his papers and spare him a second trip. You take one bite and see a thin dog staring at the bread, so you give it all to the dog. Three times in a row your friend turns up in the same shirt, so you take the new one out of your bag and give it to him. With graduation exams this year, a friend still cannot solve these hard problems, so you spend a month tutoring them to see how it goes.

At first, switching from living for yourself to living for others is hard. Once it has become a natural habit, you find that this is where happiness is. A selfish life gives a cheap kind of pleasure. A selfless life gives a noble kind of happiness. We call someone a saint because they lived so selflessly, and every religion that names saints uses a selfless life as its standard.

Being born gives us a right to certain benefits and certain joys. But a person of morals prefers to give more than to enjoy, and to serve more than to consume.

Refusing every enjoyment outright is also an extreme. We cannot work if we do not eat enough. We cannot give alms if we have no money at all. So looking after yourself in order to be able to look after others is still moral. Looking after yourself and stopping there is not. A father must eat well to plow the field and feed his family. A businessperson counts every coin so the company survives and the staff keep steady jobs. The state collects taxes strictly so it can pay its civil servants. A top leader rides in an armored car to stay alive and keep leading the country. A captain has to leave a fainting co-pilot alone and concentrate on finding a safe place to land.

What looks like acting for yourself but is really for others is still moral.

To form the noble habit of living for others, we need to love and admire the selfless saints. We need to resolve in our own hearts to live that way. We should gently encourage others to do the same. And we should not blame the selfish, only try to advise them.