On Selfishness

Self-Preservation as Moral Intelligence

Selfishness is often addressed as a moral flaw. It associates with a person who puts their own needs and wants ahead of those of others. Truly identified, it presents itself as a need to fill a role, a surrender to human instinct. Some other times, it serves as an honest shield to protect oneself when preservation becomes necessary, slightly breaching the boundaries of cruelty, never openly stepping into its grace.

Some people do not simply grow up to be the person they are; instead, they are slowly assembled by grief. It takes shape into the stitches forming the lines on their face, running down their frame, closely knitted at the base of their gut, slowly approaching their core.

The threads hold dainty skin, clinging onto a body deemed to erode, a soul who has lived too long as something expendable. Held closely by repetition rather than care: experiences that shaped it, sorrows that haunt it in the darkest of nights.

When a person becomes familiarized with wounds, pain is not a passing sensation anymore. It is structural. It’s a buildup, a cycle, a never-ending experiment. It is not dramatic; it’s cumulative. The multiplicity of it shapes everything around you. It invites a search for happiness and enlightenment, not to achieve satisfaction or indulgence, but to simply search for repair.

Repair always comes unfinished. It settles undone; nothing seems to be better than the original. Obliviousness is bliss. The happiness that comes after repair is constructed and careful. It isn’t untrue by any means. It’s just fragile. Fundamentally, repair is not about returning what was lost; it is reinvention. Recreation in its cruelest form.

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Survival. Human beings wondered how to survive before they learned the reason for their suffering. A body that has never collapsed does not know how to persist. A body that has collapsed and persisted will never forget how to survive. Yet, what protects itself upon its collapse is deemed monstrous. It is deemed selfish.

The cause of the collapse matters the most. Humans are never ready to delve into the deepest part of their being to search for relief. We hover at the surface releasing all types of emotions in different forms. In anger, in sadness, in solitude. Different forms of protection, a cry for help to those who get to witness it.

Religiously, endurance is praised more than relief. If God is real, then pain demands clarification. Not a metaphor or a summary; it demands accountability. Silence becomes a sound; it becomes compliance, almost like participation. Why must we be tested? Why must we critically be deemed selfish when the test is not endured?

Sanctification. The test seems to aim to measure faith, but instead, it exposes human design. It restructures a human, rewrites his lines, reopens his wounds, and restitches them when all is said and done. It undoes a human. It teaches him tolerance, resilience, and endurance, but yet, it does not teach him repair.

There are situations that cannot be redeemed from within. To relinquish faith in them is not a lack of loyalty but an act of self-preservation.

I used to think that a body that gives all the time was virtuous; kindness is the essence of greatness after all. But after further thought, I have realized that there is a limit to how much you can give before you’re emptied out and left to fend for yourself.

To abandon these situations might also seem like cowardice. Yet, selfishness in this context is not excess; it’s subtraction.

The intentional removal of self to heal, to try and find refuge, to search for repair somewhere else. A place where your heart doesn’t hurt as much as it does now. A place where it is vitreous to protect yourself before fending for others. The conscious withdrawal from conditions that deplete without refilling.

It is a boundary rather than cruelty. Wanting better is not an act against creation; it is evidence of awareness.

What I’m trying to say is that observing one’s own sense of self and knowing when to let go of matters that are drowning you in sorrow is the most important part of survival. You get to pick up the final pieces of yourself and move on. You decide when sorrow ends and when repair begins. You suffer, you learn, and you live.

No one wants to experience loss. Loss is absence, and absence in itself becomes presence the more you wallow in it. The more you feed on it. The more you let it tear you apart and stitch you right back up.

So, wake up.

Exhaustion is not devotion. Retrying a million times could work, but it might also fracture your sense of self. Letting go is not refusing to try. It is refusing to be consumed by what does not change, refusing to let loss consume what is left of you.

What is deemed selfish is often simply the refusal to be broken again. This refusal marks the start of a focused effort rather than the conclusion of it. Choosing where to focus one's strength instead of dispersing it until nothing is left is sometimes necessary for survival. Sometimes, you need to be selfish to live. Be selfish enough to break free.