“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”
True! But maybe not for the reasons you think.
If you’re healthy and decent, you view your life as important. Your LIFE is important — and therefore you are. But if you’re decent, you realize life is good. Not just your life — but everyone’s. This doesn’t mean you care about everyone’s life equally. That’s ridiculous. If you claim you value everyone else’s life more than yours, or even the same as yours, then you’re lying. You only have one life to live — and it’s your own. Of course your own is most important. Even if you’d die for your child or your beloved, it’s because of what that person means to YOUR life. Strangers are not the same.
The reason some people need to feel “important” is because they haven’t found value in their own life. Survival maybe, but that’s about it. No meaning, no purpose, no goals. Just survival. This leads such people to turn to others for unnecessary visibility. “If others applaud me, then I — and my life — are important.” No, that’s not true. And if you go down this path you’ll never be satisfied. If Hitler had never been stopped, and if he had achieved world domination, he would never have been satisfied, beyond a few hours or days, at most. He’d want more. And he would have destroyed even more people than he did.
I have noticed that depressed people don’t view life as important; therefore, it’s impossible for them to view their own lives as important. We talk about self-responsibility. But there’s no point to self-responsibility unless you care about the life your self-responsibility is to serve. We talk about today’s self-centered, “selfish” masses of people. But they’re not this way because they view life as important. If they really cherished and understood the potential life has to offer them, they’d yearn to rise to the occasion. Instead, they (literally or figuratively) live in their parents’ basements. That’s not what life is about. But if you believe that’s all there is, you’ll live that way.
It’s a bit of a paradox, but it’s true: If you view life as important, then you don’t need to be seen as important by others. You won’t charge through life trying to prove something. You’ll simply live it.
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