From a young age, we are taught that one of the greatest risks to our integrity and flourishing is our own selfishness. Being good means, at its most basic, putting other people more squarely at the centre of our lives.
But for some of us, the problem isn’t so much that we are heedless to this advice, rather that we take it far too closely and remorselessly to heart. So mindful are we of the risks of selfishness, we run into an opposite danger: an abnegation of the self; a manic inability to say ‘no’ or cause the slightest frustration to others.
The priority may then be to rediscover our latent reserves of selfishness…
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