Your Life Matters

Effective Egoism: Lesson 1

It’s all about you.

Has anyone ever told you that? Probably not. Instead, you’re born into the world without a say in the matter, and from day one people are telling you how unimportant you really are, as if you were an uninvited guest intruding on a party. “Think of others first.” “Don’t be selfish.” “Do as you’re told.” “It’s not all about you.”

And yet the people you’re supposed to serve and sacrifice for? They’re all being told the same thing. Servants serving servants serving servants. None of us has a right to exist for our own sake. It’s servants all the way down.

Few people really believe that, of course. Most parents want their kids to be happy, to find fulfilling jobs, passionate romances—not join a monastery or start a soup kitchen. I’ve yet to meet a parent who thinks of other people’s children first. They say things like “think of others first” because they believe they’re supposed to say it—and because they believe that thinking of yourself is a given. Telling people to value their own happiness is supposed to be as pointless as telling them to breathe. They do that automatically. The real challenge in life is learning to rein in their innate selfishness for the sake of others.

Really?

As a parent, coach, mentor, and long-time human being, nothing is more obvious to me than that people do not automatically value their own lives and happiness—and that, even when they do, knowing how to make the most of their lives and actually achieve their happiness is the most daunting challenge a person will ever face.

As I write this, headlines are announcing that drug overdose deaths have reached a record high. Were the addicts hooked on fentanyl treating their lives as if they mattered? What about the people who stay in abusive relationships? The people who smoke too much, drink too much, and exercise too little? The people who join cults and crusades demanding selfless obedience to the leader or the cause? What about the millions of people sitting in their therapist’s office wrestling with feelings of shame, self-doubt, and self-contempt? Is the problem they value themselves too highly?

Even when people do seek the best for their lives, it’s not as though it’s obvious what to do. Most of the people I know well are active, ambitious, and reasonably self-confident. Yet they, too, struggle. How do I find a career that I love? What do I do when my parents’ values don’t align with mine? How can I restore my self-respect after I’ve taken an action unworthy of me? How should I move forward when what I want and what I think I should want clash?

Sacrifice is easy. You just give up what you want. But knowing what you want? Coming up with a vision of who you want to be and the life you want to live, figuring out how to realize it, staying true to that vision over the course of years and decades while overcoming distractions, obstacles, and outside pressure? There is nothing more difficult, more rare, or more heroic than building a self and a life that you love.

But there’s a science that exists to teach you to do it.

Philosophy.

Check Your Assumptions

My dad was a Navy pilot, and when I was nine, his job took us from Virginia to Japan. It was like moving to a different planet. People didn’t shake hands—they bowed. People didn’t drive on the right side of the road—they drove on the left. Wearing shoes in the house was taboo, but openly looking at porn on the train? Just fine.

We take so much of human behavior for granted: this is just the way people do things. We never question many of the assumptions behind our beliefs and behaviors because it doesn’t feel like we’re selecting among alternatives. We’re just believing and doing what comes naturally. But there are alternatives.

Some of the alternatives people face are completely optional conventions. It doesn’t matter what side of the road you drive on, so long as everyone in the area drives on the same side. But other alternatives matter. They can be right or wrong—good or bad. We take it for granted that slavery is evil. Not everyone in history has.

Philosophy is the subject that examines our deepest assumptions about life: about what we are, where we are, how we know, how we should live. In fact, philosophy got its start precisely when different cultures started interacting on a mass scale. The ancient Greeks never questioned that they worshipped the right gods, or that their conceptions of the good, the just, and the noble were correct. But they kept running into cultures that didn’t share their outlook. Cultures that worshipped different gods. That had different conceptions of virtue. That organized society in wildly different ways.

Suddenly, the Greeks faced a real question: how do we know we’re right?

If you’ve studied any philosophy, you’ve probably read some of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. In those dialogues, Socrates goes around Athens asking one very basic question: do you know what the hell you’re talking about? He happens upon Athenians debating whether this or that thing is just, and he says: “Hold on. What is justice? If you don’t know that, you’ll never be able to say for sure whether a particular action is just or not.”

That was the beginning of philosophy. Philosophy doesn’t just identify your most basic assumptions. It allows you to question them. To think about them self-consciously and critically so that you know your most basic assumptions are true. And, once you know they are true, philosophy leaves you with an explicit framework you can use to solve all the particular real-life problems you face.

Why does all this matter? Because if you aren’t aware of the assumptions you’re making, you’re out of control. You’re acting blindly, in the grip of ideas that are invisible to you. Ideas that, all too often, are contributing to your fears, self-doubts, frustrations, conflicts, and regrets.

Here’s one example. Are you in control of your life? Do you have the power to choose—or are you at the mercy of the invisible forces of nature and nurture, your genes and your environment? Even if you’ve never taken a formal position on the issue of free will versus determinism, you can’t escape making certain assumptions about whether you’re in control of your life and responsible for your actions. It’s no accident that even the most uneducated criminal will appeal to determinism to rationalize his crimes and subdue his guilt. “I couldn’t help it, that’s the way I was raised.” (Never mind that his siblings managed to stay out of prison.)

This book is about self-creation. It’s about taking ownership of your life, refusing to bow to routine or conformity or conventional wisdom, and instead making the commitment to actively create your life—and your soul. Here’s how my greatest philosophic influence, Ayn Rand, once put it:

Just as man’s physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by “soul,” I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and make his life worth living. He is born without the knowledge of either. He has to discover both—and translate them into reality—and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.

My deepest conviction is that each of us is a being of self-made soul. And the only way to make your soul consciously and deliberately is through philosophic inquiry. It’s philosophy that puts you in the driver seat of your life. If you ignore philosophic issues, you will still be in the grip of philosophic ideas—but you’ll take over those ideas blindly and accidentally from the people around you. You will be the product of your environment. To be self-made—to design your life on your own terms—you have to examine your deepest assumptions. And be willing to change them.

The Anti-Self Assumption

In my judgment, the assumption that’s done more damage to self-creation than any other is the one that equates being moral with being selfless. It’s the assumption that says: to live a fulfilling, moral, meaningful life, you must serve a cause greater than yourself. I call this the dictum, and you hear it everywhere.

• “The richest men and women possess nothing of real value if their lives have no greater object than themselves,” said the late senator John McCain.

• “It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role that you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in the American story,” Barack Obama told students at Wesleyan University.

• “Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves,” agreed Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

• “Get out of the shallow waters of selfishness and give yourself to causes greater than yourself,” Mitt Romney told Coe College graduates. “Launch yourself into the deep waters of great causes.”

To serve a cause greater than yourself is to act “in ways that are beyond personal concerns and direct personal gain.” In the terminology of psychological anthropologist Richard Shweder, it is to embrace an ethic of community or of divinity. Meaning is to be sought in the group or in God—in society or the sky. Not the “I.”

And who could disagree? The alternative, we’re taught, is to be self-centered: to be, in Urban Dictionary’s trenchant description, “The asshole that won’t offer a hand to anybody.” And assholes aren’t happy. They project, not joy, serenity, or confidence, but fear, touchiness, and neediness. They can, if clever and ambitious, achieve the trappings of success: money, status, power. But there is nothing to them.

What the “self-centered” fail to recognize, and what lends the dictum plausibility, is that you do need to live for something. You do need to set your sights beyond your transient desires and fears. You do need to aim at the highest possible good. In short, you need to live for a moral ideal. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt hints at the issue:

Aristotle asked about aretē (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim. Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: Just let the elephant graze or roam where he pleases. And because elephants live in herds, one ends up doing what everyone else is doing. Yet the human mind has a rider, and as the rider begins to think more abstractly in adolescence, there may come a time when he looks around, past the edges of the herd, and asks: Where are we all going? And why?

It is a moral ideal that helps you answer these questions: Where am I going? And why? It is what sets your proper aim and establishes the virtues that will realize your aim. It helps you decide what kind of person you should strive to become by outlining an inspiring and ennobling vision of what is possible to you—a vision that you acquire first and foremost through art.

You hear Cyrano de Bergerac declare that he has “decided to be admirable, in everything, for everything” . . . You witness a fugitive declare in open court, “I am Jean Valjean” . . . You listen as Scout is exhorted, “stand up. Your father’s passin’” . . . You gaze at Michelangelo’s David or David’s Death of Socrates . . . You are swept away by the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s second.

These experiences, and the deep, soul-changing emotions they evoke, elevate you. “Elevate” means: inspire you to live for a moral ideal.

Philosopher Allan Bloom argues the point eloquently in The Closing of the American Mind, writing that idealism

should have primacy in education, for man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. . . . As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.

This is tragic. And it explains, at a much deeper level, the “self-centeredness” that you see in those who do not live for a moral ideal. Their failure is not that they attend only to their own desires—it’s that they do not attend to their own souls.

And so you do not see in such people the ambitious self-improvement of Ben Franklin, the proud dignity of Abraham Lincoln, the principled courage of Harriet Tubman, the indomitable will of Winston Churchill, the all-consuming curiosity of Bill Gates, the intense passion and demanding quest for beauty of Steve Jobs.

The “self-centered” have no self on which to be centered—only a hazy canvas of self-doubt and a palette of pretense. What we call their desires are only the unexamined impulses given to them by nature or copied from neighbors. What we call their “ego” is precisely the cloak that conceals an empty hole where genuine self-respect could have grown. They cannot show gratitude, appreciation, or admiration because those are marks, not of humility, but of spiritual abundance.

Art has the power to show us what it looks like to live up to a moral ideal and give us the spiritual fuel to seek the ideal in our own lives. What art cannot do is validate any particular ideal or elucidate its principles. That is the task of ethics.

What ideal should you pursue? Should you live for God, as religion says? Should you live for pleasure, as the hedonists say? Should you live for society, as everyone today says?

I believe that the moral ideal you should strive for is an ideal of self-interest or egoism. The full argument for that claim will have to wait. For now, it’s sufficient to observe that the very reason you have for seeking an ideal gives a clue as to what kind of ideal to embrace. For if it is your happiness that is at stake in deciding whether to pursue a moral ideal at all, then that suggests that your happiness is the proper goal of morality.

Today “happiness” has been castrated and no longer carries deep meaning. We equate it with momentary satisfaction or an ephemeral sense of “feeling good.” Jordan Peterson calls happiness “fleeting and unpredictable,” like “cotton candy.”

This is deeply wrong. Happiness is not weather—it is climate. It is the emotional undertone of a life well-lived. Happiness is not something you lose when life gets difficult: happiness, and the promise of it, is what sustains you in choppy waters.

Even worse than confusing happiness with fleeting satisfaction are the false idols of happiness: an addict getting his fix, a preacher shouting hosannas, an Instagram “influencer” hash-tagging a sunset, a self-help guru sporting a phony perma-grin.

My God.

Years ago I took my six-year-old swimming. She was petrified—then she became brave. She stopped clinging to the side of the pool. Eventually, she would doggy paddle as I held her. When I let her go, she at first reached for me in fear. The next time, she tried.

“I’m swimming! I’m swimming!” She could not stop yelling it. “I’m swimming!” I cannot communicate that tone of voice, except to say that it was ineffable in the literal meaning of that term. I cannot communicate what I felt, except to say that only once had I felt it in so intense a form—when, at the climax of The Miracle Worker, Annie Sullivan ecstatically cries out, “She knows!”

That is a glimpse into happiness. Happiness is a life of unadulterated joy in existence, in your capacity to live, and in your worthiness of living. And it is the conviction, in those moments when you suffer terribly, that suffering is not your proper state but an aberration to be fought, endured, conquered, and forgotten.

This rich, enduring concept of happiness was endorsed by Aristotle as our proper moral end, to be served by the cultivation of virtue. Virtue, he and other ancients held, is not a detour sign leading you away from your interests, but a golden road showing you the way to happiness.

What virtues do lead to happiness? The ancients’ list included reason, courage, honesty, justice, pride. They, however, had not lived through the Industrial Revolution but in aristocratic societies reliant on slavery. This masked for them the role of production in human life—production as the central rational activity allowing us to flourish.

This was one of the gaps filled in by Ayn Rand. Building on the Aristotelian tradition, Rand emphasized that the pursuit of creative, productive goals should not be relegated to some amoral “practical” sphere of life. It is at the heart of a moral, flourishing, happy existence.

The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man’s mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values.

That is the path to happiness: to live for an ideal—but an earthly ideal that treats your life as sacred and teaches you to thrive through your own thought and effort.

The most important question you face in life is not what is its meaning? It is: What do I want? And that question is to be answered, not by staring blankly at your desires, but by examining them. Are they consistent with reality? Are they consistent with each other? Do they reflect the highest aspirations of which you can conceive? What are the virtues required to achieve them?

For most moralists, this is blasphemy. “It’s not all about you,” begins the best-selling Purpose Driven Life.

Religion’s contribution to ethics was to declare that when you ask, “What do I want?” about your life, you are asking the wrong question. As philosopher Onkar Ghate has pointed out, religion replaces an earthly father demanding blind obedience with a Heavenly Father demanding blind obedience. Morality isn’t about doing what you want, it’s about doing as you’re told.

Jordan Peterson has made the point that even atheists believe in God, if judged by their actions. I half agree: most atheists believe in God if judged by their ethics. They accept a secularized form of the Christian morality, wherein it is not God who issues commandments that trump what you want, but other people. Auguste Comte called this “altruism,” meaning “other-ism.” It means self-sacrifice: placing other people and their demands above your own personal happiness.

Whatever the differences, religious ethics and social ethics agree on one thing: the good must be some form of subordinating the self to an outside authority’s orders.

The ugly meaning of this doctrine—that what matters to you doesn’t matter—is whitewashed by equating religious morality and altruism with love, benevolence, and generosity.

This is madness.

Other people are very obviously an enormous source of pleasure. Aristotle devotes two chapters in his ethics to friendship, and Rand viewed romantic love as life’s greatest reward. That has nothing to do with the anti-self moralities of religion and altruism. Who would want to be considered a friend or a lover not for the personal pleasure that we give our companion, but out of charity or duty?

The central issue in ethics is not whether to love and help others. It is whether you are committed to achieving personal values—or whether you are committed to surrendering personal values and serving impersonal causes because some external authority says so.

Serve a cause greater than yourself? Creating a self that is worthy and capable of happiness is the greatest cause there is.

Our agenda

In this book, you’ll discover a new view of morality, a view that says your life matters, and your job is not to serve and sacrifice, but to learn how to build a self and a life that you love.

I’ve titled this book Effective Egoism because its goal is to help you make the most of your own life—and because its principles are effective. I’ve seen these ideas give people born into poverty and abuse the power to become happy and confident. I’ve seen these ideas give people born into dictatorships the courage to flee to freedom. I’ve seen these ideas help people launch great careers, end bad marriages, stand up for justice, and build characters of iron. And I know that everything good in my own life, from my career to my relationships to moments of quiet joy spent with my favorite works of art, I owe to the philosophic principles you’re about to discover.

But since this book’s title is also taking an obvious jab at the “Effective Altruism” movement, let me clarify a potential misunderstanding.

Effective Altruism is a movement claiming to advise people on how to do the most good. In the words of the Centre for Effective Altruism:

It is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible. It is also a community of people taking these answers seriously, by focusing their efforts on the most promising solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

My critique of Effective Altruists will come in Lesson 3. For now, I want to note that Effective Altruists assess the value of different projects through a utilitarian-type calculus guided by empirical data. For example, they ask: What kinds of activities save the most lives for the lowest cost? What existential risks does mankind face, and what are the best ways to mitigate them?

So you might expect that a book titled Effective Egoism would propose something similar. That we’d be poring over data concerning which jobs have the highest earning potential or which dating strategies yield the most attractive romantic partners. Or that we’d be examining the kinds of “happiness studies” beloved by psychologists and social scientists. Nothing could be more alien to my approach.

What you’ll find here is a philosophical argument. Because, as we’ll see, philosophy is the science of happiness. Here, then, is the book’s basic argument:

• Lesson 2: You have free will, and that free will gives you the power to build a self and a life that you love.

• Lesson 3: To fully realize that power you need moral guidance—not the guidance offered by today’s anti-self moral theories, but the guidance offered by a morality of self-interest.

• Lesson 4: Your self-interest demands living a life of reason.

• Lesson 5: Your self-interest demands living a life of purpose.

• Lesson 6: Your self-interest demands achieving self-esteem.

• Lesson 7: You experience happiness through rational pleasures—above all, the pleasure offered by work, art, and love.

Let the journey begin.