You are the hero of your life. Your idea of yourself is way bigger than you. Your whole life till now has been about handling yourself. You read stuff that you think will help you. You watch stuff that will entertain you. You have distinctive containers of people in your life-

1. people you love and care deeply about

2. people you know and don’t really care about but will probably help if they come around asking for it

3. people you don’t know, you don’t really care about and will probably not go out of your way to help until that’s your mood on a particular day.

4. people you hate and don’t want to be around

(maybe you also have a container with people who you hate but still care enough to peep into their lives and feel sad if they succeed ) if you do have this container, please throw it out right away. This article demands at least some level of wisdom from the reader.

The distinctions in one’s mind are quite natural. These distinctions help you streamline your efforts and time that you dedicate to people other than YOU. The alarming thing is that with the rise of individualistic and capitalistic economies, the container 1 of people we deeply care about has seen a gradual shrinkage. The scary thing is it has shrunk to concerning levels and the society fails to notice this. We notice the consequence often ignoring the cause. The reduction is size of container 1 is one of the root causes of problems plaguing the world today.

The consequence of such self-centered approach ranges from petty office politics to daunting climate change.

Unfortunately, in a time when you and I grew up, individualistic achievements were held far more important than collective growth. Most educational as well as corporate systems reward people with a belief that if everyone is motivated to do well at an individual level, the complete group constituting these individuals would do well. While team building is like an extra-curricular activity, a lot of us are conditioned to keep individual development at the core of everything we do during our entire lives. This individualistic focus can have a remarkably negative effect on a group. This group could be a family, a school, a neighbourhood, a corporate environment, or the society as a whole.

You are guilty of being a part of the cause. You are also the victim suffering from the consequences. Take your time to absorb this.

You are guilty of being a part of the cause. You are also the victim suffering from the consequences.

So, how do you tackle this? Now that your brain is trained in this ‘me-first’ system, how do you really break free. I wish the answer was easy. We may assume that the solution to the individualism problem can only be found if collectively people embrace collectivism. A lack of collective acceptance of collectivism led to the fall of it.

But if individualism is shunned, collectivism too will have its own set of loopholes and problems. If there is one person who starts manipulating the collectivist ideology in favour of his/her own ideology, the whole group can be misdirected as was in the case of Nazis. Since there are limitations to the number of people who will agree with and follow a single ideology, this leads to formation of figments of several groups who end up clashing with each other based on their different ideologies and then start acting only in the interest of their own group. The group here takes an individual identity and often starts acting as a self-absorbed entity, thus again giving rise to the same problems that come with individualism. Also, the intra-group dynamics and friction between individuals always come into picture. If one person in the group starts acting selfish and the others realize that they are being taken advantage of and then they start acting selfishly too. Afterall the human being’s self-preserving mechanism is bound to kick-in.

So how do we amalgamate collectivism and individualism? Can we begin by trying to think more about the repercussions and impact our individual actions create? Can we value helpfulness and fairness more than we value winning, in our own personal lives? Can we become more compassionate and expand our container of people who we care about? Can we value our responsibilities more than our rights? Can we all nurture a caregiver inside us? Can we look beyond our own interests, forget the bodily boundaries and become a part of the universal consciousness?

I leave you with these questions for you to answer for yourself. Hopefully you will endeavor to reduce accumulating more guilt over time and in turn reduce your own sufferings.