I have recently become really aware of just how selfish we are as people. I am astounded by how often I put myself before others and how often others do the same. This is probably rooted in early philosophical and psychological theories stating that man will take the necessary and sometimes drastic measures to serve and defend himself, a concept more commonly referred to as self-preservation. However, in a day and age when technology flourishes and face to face communication is on the decline, we make a much greater effort to keep our heads down, ignore other people’s problems, and mind our own business. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
We’re told from early on that we should mind our own business. Being nosy is generally regarded as a negative personality trait that fuels gossip, judgment, and jealousy. The thing is, however, that in our world today, when people everywhere are plagued with unspeakable problems that are unimaginable to most of us, caring about other people’s problems, or at least being aware, becomes more important than it ever was before.
If you were waiting for a better time to make this change, to worry less about yourself and more about other people, that time doesn’t exist. Here and now, due to the rapid population growth we have witnessed in start of the 21st century, we are now the smallest and most insignificant unit possible that exists in our universe and probably will ever exist in our universe. There is no better time than the present to realize how little we, and our own needs and concerns, actually matter in the grand scheme of things.
My mom always told me growing up that you never have to look far to find someone who has it worse than you. This rings constantly true for me even today. But even when making ourselves aware of the problems with which others are burdened, we should be able to move past simply being aware, and move towards working to relieve the problems from which other people suffer.
To give you a better idea of just how small you actually are, let’s take a look at some numbers:
Looking at a relatively small population, attendees of North Carolina State University, your problems manifest themselves in one person out of 33,989 people as of October 15, 2014. Among those 33,989 people are millions of problems, larger and smaller than our own that we don’t think about nearly enough. Students attending NC State struggle with harassment, hunger, extreme poverty, homelessness, while some of these issues may never cross your radar.
Zooming out, we see that you are in fact one person out of the 431,746 total that live in the city of Raleigh. Zooming out even further, you are one person out of the 974,289 that live in Wake County alone. We widen the lens to include the whole state of North Carolina, meaning we are 1 out of 9.944 million, again one group of problems out of billions.
Even larger, we are one out of the 112.6 million inhabitants currently living on the East Coast of the United States. Even larger, we are one out of the 318.9 million living in the United States, 1 out of 528.7 million living in North America in its entirety. Feeling small yet? Get ready to feel smaller when you realize that as citizens of the planet Earth, we are one out of an approximated population of seven billion people.
What’s my point? That we are all members of multiple varieties of groups in our lives. You are one of 274 people in your accounting class, or 800 people in your dorm. Yet we tend to view our problems as if we make up a greater portion of the population. Treating our problems as if we are 200 of that 274, or 700 of that 800. Viewing this situation with a new attitude, and realizing that we are such small units of incredibly large populations, will help us to put our own problems, paying for textbooks, missing a flight, failing an exam, into more realistic perspective.
Because we are small, because we are one person out of billions, we have no excuse for behaving as selfishly as we do. The funny thing about humans is that we like to believe other people out there will take on the very human responsibility of caring for others before themselves. We think that other people are handling these things so we all believe that we are an exception to the rule that says we should worry about others. We are exceptions who don’t need to use a turn signal, don’t have to wait in line, don’t need to donate to charity, don’t need to recycle.
The problem is that 99% of us are locked in this mindset, making it nearly impossible to accomplish any kind of effective change on behalf of the greater good. And we, regardless of what many think, DO need change. Whether we need to look to the future to change the fate of generations to come, eradicate disease, stop hunger, or “Make America great again," the minute we realize how little our own problems matter, we will take enormous, united strides towards bettering the future of our world.
