Social Development > Self-Development

We need one much more than the other.

In my early 20s, I was very into self-development. I meditated under a teacher, taught yoga in my community, and even wrote a self-development blog. I relied on these practices to heal from depression and anxiety after a difficult adolescence and on those fronts they helped a lot, but by my late 20s I’d taken things too far.

By then I was living in Marin County, California, surrounded by Burning Man devotees and Marianne Williamson diehards who would say things like “I feel such a deep connection with you” before never speaking to me again, or hum that “we are all one” during a mushroom trip only to never ask about my family or offer to help me move into my new home. It didn’t take me long to realize that while it might be beneficial to focus on oneself for a time, in excess it becomes straight-up narcissism.

And the world doesn’t need more self-interested people. It needs more helpful people.

I think there’s a misguided belief that self-development makes us better people. But if we want to be better people we have to focus on others, not ourselves. At some point, I realized this and changed tack. Rather than ask what I needed, I asked what my community needed. At the time, there were a lot of disadvantaged and foster youth in my area and I decided to volunteer for a youth organization. I became the head leader and spent a few years hanging out with high school kids three times a week and taking them to camp in the summer.

Very quickly, I didn’t need self-development anymore. I stopped meditating, I stopped doing yoga, I deleted my blog. The anxiety and depression that had lingered despite therapy and self-help evaporated. I was more happy than I had ever been, and making much more of a direct difference in my community. I was focusing on the needs of others rather than whatever else I could find to work on in myself, and I felt a lot of meaning and purpose in my life. It’s been close to 15 years since then and I can still say with absolute certainty: The road to inner peace is actually outer peace. It’s focusing on others.

This might sound obvious, but I think we live in an era of “secure your own oxygen mask before helping others,” and while that might be a helpful mantra for airplanes I think many of us don’t seem to recognize when we are already wearing oxygen masks. We don’t need to keep adding even more oxygen to ourselves, we need to start directing our attention to others. We need to focus less on self-development and more on social development. On human welfare.

That’s what Mòzǐ did. The Chinese philosopher emerged around the same time his more famous predecessor, Confucius, died and he was a critic of the old philosopher’s ways. Confucius’ followers were focused on “self-cultivation” and put their piety on display with elaborate rituals, pretentious costumes, and self-righteous behaviors meant to show their moral superiority. I can’t help but think of the modern “we just need to cultivate self-love” set who sometimes show up in the comments section of my posts, or the tech bro founders bench-pressing as they share the benefits of cold plunges and self-betterment hacks on YouTube.

Mòzǐ was the opposite. His concern wasn’t the betterment of the self, but the betterment of those around us. In his foundational text, the Mohists “devote relatively little discussion to details of the individual moral life, such as improving one’s character or achieving various psychological goods,” Chris Fraser says in his book The Philosophy of Mozi. Instead, they devote nearly all of it to how we can make life better for others.

It wasn’t, “we should meditate.” It was: “We should build the economy so we eradicate poverty.” It wasn’t, “we should study philosophy.” It was: “We should convince rulers not to war against neighboring states.”

This was an important reframe to me. When I looked around my life, I realized the people I admired most focused their energy outward, not inward. One neighbor cut us firewood every day when he got home from work, another filled our home with hundreds of flowers after my husband and I got married. Eventually, we moved to Utah where people no longer asked me “where the light in my eyes was coming from” (an actual question asked at a business gathering in San Francisco), but rather, “how was my family?” and “did I need help painting my living room this weekend?” Despite the fact that these neighbors spent significantly less energy attending silent meditation retreats and yoga workshops, they seemed to care about me and my husband much more.

I wanted to do the same. Throughout my 30s, most of my pro-social sentiment came in the form of donating money. I was an effective altruist before I knew what that was and gave a large portion of my income to GiveDirectly and other charities that focused on economic development and health advancement globally. Locally, I got a job reporting on the business and tech scene in Salt Lake City, and I started using my writing career, not as a way to think through what was going on with me, but as a way to think through what was going on in the world and what we could do about it. I spent my weekends hosting rooftop dinners at our apartment complex, organized a block party when we moved into our new house, and hosted weekly gatherings in our neighborhood.

I’ve found a lot of purpose in this life, but as I’ve learned more about the challenges facing the world, I’ve also found myself wondering whether I should do more to solve them. Looking at pictures of Trump and Musk and Bezos sitting together plotting our futures, sometimes I feel like the only thing I can do is start an employee-owned company, get really rich doing it, and use that collective wealth for the good of our workers and community while buying a seat at Mar a Lago to influence our politics to create more of the same.

At the same time, as I approach my 40s I find “the world” I’m trying to save has become much smaller. Now when I think about how I can be of service, I think about moving to where my sisters live so I can pick their children up from school and babysit them throughout the summer. I think about being available to take a night shift and watch my sister’s new baby so she can sleep through the night. I think about hosting birthday parties for my nieces, and regular gatherings for friends in my community. I want to create a third space in my front yard where neighbors can hang out and rally my neighborhood around a project to improve our local park. As someone with a lot of time and energy, I want to use it for the good of my family, my close circle of friends, and the communities in which I live.

Which would be more impactful? Focusing on my local community and offering free babysitting to family members where daycare often costs more than $2,000/month? Or spending all of my time and energy trying to influence our politics to subsidize childcare?

Whether we should focus on our local or global communities was a point of contention between Confucius and Mòzǐ. Confucius argued that we didn’t have the bandwidth to help everyone, nor would it be right to put the needs of everyone else before our immediate families. If all we did was bring honor to our families, he reasoned, that would be enough to create a moral foundation for a better society. Mòzǐ thought we needed to do more. If we cared only for our own families, we wouldn’t hesitate to injure other families for the good of our own. Those who purchase a second home in a tourist destination, for example, may be treating their own families very well, but it might come at the detriment of local families who can no longer afford to live and work in that town.

Mòzǐ knew we needed to care for those closest to us most of all, but we still had to care about what happened to the rest of the world while we did it. That was the balance.

We have to remember that Confucius’ Analects was speaking to individuals, while the Mòzǐ was speaking to government leaders. “Few of us are positioned to take society’s needs into consideration just as we do the needs of our family or clan,” Fraser says. “But recall that the Mohist’s primary audience is men of influence, many of them government officials, and their primary concern is social policy. So a key segment of their audience may indeed be gentlemen in a position to make considerations on behalf of ‘all the world.’”

In other words, it’s not up to everyone to save the world, it’s up to those who work in saving the world. Perhaps because they are a civil servant or business leader. I’ve long been a fan of 80,000 Hours, the organization that advocates for using our careers for the collective good, and I’m personally motivated to do so in my own work. That doesn’t mean our careers are the only ways to save the world—far from it. We must also care for children, care for aging parents and special needs individuals, cook dinners for neighbors, organize local gatherings.

Even if Mòzǐ focused on global development rather than local development, we still need both. “If the world is poor, [the benevolent person] undertakes to enrich it,” he said, “if the people are few, he undertakes to increase their number; if the multitude is in disorder, he undertakes to put them in order.”

Mòzǐ’s rule of thumb was actually quite simple: “Does it benefit people? Then do it. Does it not benefit people? Then stop.”¹

I still have a lot of ambition left, and I plan to use my career for the collective good by establishing a media voice focused on imaginative and solutions-oriented journalism, researching better business models and political systems, and putting forth ideas that could eventually reach the mainstream and be put to good use for humanity. Maybe I’ll eventually create a cooperative media ecosystem owned and operated by the writers/podcasters who write/podcast for it. I want to use my work for the good of the world, and I am very driven and motivated to do that. But I also want to come home and use my personal life for the good of my family and my close-knit community and that’s even more important to me right now.

One thing I won’t be doing, however, is using my time and money to better myself.

It’s not that I’m not against self-development. There are many, very good reasons to focus on the self. There are times when we are anxious and depressed and unwell and during those times we should absolutely discontinue our relentless pursuit of everyone else and turn our attentions inward. I still return to my yoga mat on a regular basis, to my meditation when I need it, and to my mindfulness practice nearly every day. My husband and I still study philosophy and there is absolutely nothing wrong with grounding oneself in work that motivates and inspires us on a daily basis.

Those who participate in self-development and self-care in a healthy way, and for the benefit of themselves and their communities, are not the subject of this essay.

But in excess, self-development can create a world of self-interested individuals and that’s what I’m up against here. I’m against the continual process of self-betterment at the expense of community-betterment. I’m against participating in too much theory and not enough action. We can focus on being more loving and more empathetic and more compassionate all we like but we won’t actually be any of those things unless we do something to help our families, our close communities, and even the world at large.

As Hasan Minhaj joked in his recent standup special: Therapy is like a haircut. You can’t tell me about it, I have to notice the difference.

We can and should take good care of ourselves, but when we are good enough we also need to focus our time and energy on others—on our immediate communities or our larger ones—and that’s the focus of my life now, both professionally and personally.

The world doesn’t need a bunch of enlightened people. It needs a bunch of helpful people.

Thankfully, helping others helps us too.

How are you thinking about being of service this year? Join us in the comments for further literary salon discussion!

Happy New Year!

Elle Griffin

1. Mz 32/1-2