On the Boundaries of Our "Self"

At times I notice how people — worn out, perhaps, by the weight of responsibility and the care of others — begin to close in on themselves, peeling their own interests away from everyone else’s, sometimes even from the people closest to them.

For example: a family used to share one budget, and suddenly the main “breadwinner” announces he’s done spending his money on shared needs and proposes everyone live on their own dime, calling it the fair thing to do. Or a company turns an extra profit, and the boss starts to see himself as the sole author of that success and doesn’t share the result with the people who work for him. Or someone simply refuses to help when he perfectly well could, arguing that it’s every man for himself: not my problem, not my area of responsibility, you can’t help everyone, and so on. We hear it in lines like “Why me?”, “I don’t owe anyone anything,” and their cousins.

Recently I ran into an interesting hypothesis: our “Self” is not only our body, but also the sum of our mental notions about where the self ends — boundaries that can contract or expand, taking in the people and the space around us.

Take the body, for instance. Studies show that when a person is facing the amputation of a limb, his inner sense of the body’s boundaries contracts even before the operation, and the brain stops counting that limb as part of the organism.

On the other hand, our “Self” can expand onto the people around us, when we start to feel someone as a kind of part of ourselves. How does that happen?

Imagine we’ve “glued” ourselves to another person, and now we have four arms, four legs, we need to eat more, our goals like it or not become shared, and we have to find a balance between the interests of two — possibly very different — personalities. We can’t wish harm on any part of our joined being, because that would harm us too. Our level of responsibility doubles, and the phrase “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” takes on a literal meaning.

It’s the same with space. Walking down the street, say, you can spot at once where someone has spread his “Self” onto the patch of land by his building — clean, cared for, with beautiful flowers — clearly going beyond anything the city ever planted there.

What’s all this about?

The further and wider our “Self” reaches, the more resources the world hands us.

When our “Self” is bounded by nothing but ourselves, resources come only to meet our own needs. For some, that’s enough.

But when we gradually expand our “Self” onto the people close to us, our colleagues, the company, our partners, the city around us, its residents, and then the whole country — wishing them well the way we wish ourselves well, and actually trying to make it happen — we take on responsibility. And in return, more and more resources are handed to us, in proportion to how well we do at that mission. We become conductors (as in physics) of those resources and opportunities, so there’s enough to go around.

I called it a mission because it can feel like a kind of burden we carry for other people. In part, maybe it is. But what’s the alternative?

Here’s to all of us widening the boundaries of our “Self”! 😎