Think of that phrase, It’s not all about you!
This is what somebody might say in an argument, You think everything’s about you! There’s even that famous Carly Simon song, You’re so vain.
I bet you think this song is about you.
Don’t you? don’t you!
You don’t want to be that person that thinks everything is about you.
But you are.
Not because you’re vain, but because Everything IS about you.
Without an observer (you), space-time itself has no meaning. Subatomic particles have no idea where they are or how fast they’re moving without you. Without you reality continues to swirl around in potential energy and particles.
Without you, there is not color. Ask a mathematician:
It’s all about you. Everything you have ever experienced, love, sex, a ripe mango –as well as all the arguments you’ve ever had –is about you.
You might think you’re defending an objective position, or something ideological or moral, but you’re defending your own story, your own sense of self.
In a heated argument, no matter how objective you believe yourself to be and how ridiculous your partner not to see it, your opinions are all about you.
This is not to say that there are not altruistic people who deeply believe in unselfish values, but even for them, that belief is their story.
What they truly believe is their stories about reality, and ideologies and beliefs are details and structures of other stories.
But stories come first.
And stories come from desire.
We have some impulses, and underneath it all is desire to live, an imperative, maybe evolutionary or maybe the spirit of God within us, but that desire creates our stories.
Everything is about what you want.
And that’s OK.
That’s not selfish.
It’s being human.
But it leads to the question:
If it’s all about you and what YOU want:
What do you want most?
Or to use the profound question that Yuval Harari poses at the end of Sapiens, What do you want to want?
The Writers' High 