Less Difficult

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other”
George Eliot

What do you live for? I think most of us struggle between our own selfish needs and a real urge to help others. It is a struggle because we can’t be really happy unless we look after our own needs and desires, which frequently conflict with what other people want, or expect, of us. We want what we want, not what other people want. We know how unsatisfying it feels to do what someone else wants that goes against what we want. That’s the thing. We end up feeling resentful of others who “make” us do things we don’t want to do. And chances are, we’re not going to do a very good job of it anyway. They aren’t going to be happy with it.

Yet we do want to help other people. Perhaps what we need is to find a way to do that without sacrificing our own needs and desires in the process. It turns out that the only time you can help other people is when you can think about the person and feel good at the same time. It is when you can expect the other person to succeed at whatever it is that they want to acheive because you beleive that they can do it. The truth is that helping other people helps ourselves too. We live to make life less difficult for each other. Helping others makes us feel good about ourself. But only when we aren’t sacrificing what we want in order to give them what they want