Fernando Torrijos

Are we victims of the Age of Self? It is a logical question if we observe that issues such as self-realization, personal growth or improvement of limitations become centers of interest in our societies, in which fight for survival for the majority it has gone to a third place. Which is very good.

The paradox is that more and more human beingsonce their basic and even superfluous material needs are met, instead of enjoying life, often show erratic tendenciescapsize mentally and engage with some frequency in psychological crises.

Here is a video with phrases about sharing.

Go from I to we

It is worth asking what degree of responsibility this epidemic of self-absorption that we suffer can have in this situation; that pathology that generates egocentric perspective with which more and more people try to solve their problems; a point of view that starts from the premise that these problemssomehow, They are created by Others.

The Others are those who are neither Me nor like Me. There are too many of them, they are foreign to us… And even They dare to interfere in our path and frustrate our dreams.

Sometimes we identify with them momentarily, because in what happens to them we are able to perceive a reflection of what could happenbut it is usually a pleasant feeling of compassion that lasts little.

Luckily, not everyone who is not Self is Other. At the midpoint of this constant struggle are the others: those who have abandoned otherness to the extent that their lives matter to us. It is about the people who, without being me, are part of me; Therefore, to define them, I integrate them with me in a higher unit which I call We.

There are us, like the familythose we have not chosen: they are result of chance that we do not understand but that roots us in life. Others, like friends or partnerare the fruit of a mutual election consensus; in the limits remain the companions with whom we share jobs or hobbies.

The absence of a higher unity marks our life: loneliness is nothing but the lack of ourselves.

The importance of sharing

Possibly we are victims of the Age of the Self, but let us not forget that, more than hate or accident, what generates victimization is usually bad choicesdenial of problems or fear of change… And an erroneous understanding of reality.

What if the usual explanation of the individual Self is a myth and what really counts is our social self? What if the «we», to whom we feel we belong, are more important than those who preach Ego worship admit?

In the «production» of usThere is no doubt that chance intervenes. But it is the fruit, above all, of a shared jobof daily chores, of the sum of details, of know each other next to you in the distance.

A proposal to grow is to recover Others to outline who we are beyond what we seesymbolically, in the mirror.

Forget the self-absorption and feel them as the part of us that they are; accept them to come to accept us, and not so that they accept us; fight to know them as a way of getting to know ourselves; love them to continue loving each other.

Recover being «ourselves» and meditate, while sharing, that old Arabic saying that states that Hell is nothing but Paradise without people.