If life isn’t working, you need better habits, the right productivity system, or a new morning ritual. Success stories fuel this myth. Tales of individual achievements that ignore how the background, wealth and social networks create every opportunity in the first place.
Our fixation on improving ourselves has become our cultural obsession. Yet despite all our self-examination, we’ve never felt more isolated from each other. Elle Griffin gets it right:
“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.”
Her insight cuts to the heart of it—the gap between understanding ourselves and actually helping others. Inner work matters, but Griffin warns 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.”
What we need isn’t another round of introspection but small, meaningful actions: cooking dinner for a sick friend or neighbour (and knowing them well enough to do so), showing up at town meetings to push for better parks, or lending a hand when your neighbourhood needs it. These acts might seem small compared to our hunger for personal transformation, but they remind us of something essential:
Your well-being is tied to the people around you.
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