Intelligent Selfishness: How Giving to Others Enriches Your Own Life
The Dalai Lama once said, “If you would like to be selfish, you should do it in a very intelligent way. The stupid way to be selfish is seeking happiness for ourselves alone. The intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of others.”This ancient wisdom feels strikingly relevant today, urging us to rethink what it truly means to live a fulfilled life.
In a world often dominated by disconnection and negativity, how do we reconcile our pursuit of happiness with the well-being of others? Many of us are convinced that society is in moral decline, with kindness and compassion fading away. Headlines scream of division and disaster, leading us to believe that we are becoming less human, less connected. Yet, this belief, while pervasive, is fundamentally misguided.
Recent research published in Nature by Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert sheds light on this misconception. This study was done over the course of 70 years, involving more than 12 million people, the majority consistently believed that morality was declining. But when Americans were asked in 2020 to rate how “kind, honest, nice, and good” people were, the actual rates of kind behavior had remained consistent over time.
The researchers found that “modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did — which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness, and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year, for millennia.”
“Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably good records of extremely immoral behavior such as slaughter and conquest, slavery and subjugation, or murder and rape, and careful analyses of those historical records strongly suggest that these objective indicators of immorality have decreased significantly over the last few centuries.”
This study challenges the pervasive belief in moral decline. The issue, I believe, is not that kindness and compassion are disappearing; rather, we’re simply not paying enough attention to them. We’re so consumed by the pursuit of individual success that we overlook the opportunities for connection and kindness right in front of us.
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This is where the concept of intelligent selfishness comes into play. To live intelligently selfishly is to understand that our well-being is linked with the well-being of others. The happiness we seek is most easily found when we contribute to the happiness of those around us. This isn’t a new idea; it’s a truth we’ve written about in books, echoed by philosophers and spiritual leaders for centuries. But in today’s fast-paced, success-driven world, it’s a truth we must constantly remind ourselves of.
Gratitude plays a crucial role in this process. As we write in our book, according to Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory, positive emotions like gratitude do more than just make us feel good temporarily — they broaden our thought-action repertoires, allowing us to see more possibilities and think more creatively. “Broadened mindsets carry indirect and long-term adaptive benefits because broadening builds enduring personal resources,” Fredrickson explains. These resources become reserves we can draw on during future challenges, enhancing our resilience and overall well-being.
Positive emotions encourage us to think creatively, act in new ways, and connect more effectively with others. This leads to the development of social support, skills, resilience, and resources, which in turn make us healthier, more likely to survive, and more likely to thrive. The entire process then repeats itself, creating a positive feedback loop.
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In my work facilitating gratitude experiences, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of this practice. When people reflect on who they are grateful for and why, they often discover that their greatest sources of happiness aren’t their achievements but their relationships. This realization is both humbling and empowering, shifting the focus from what we’ve done for ourselves to what we’ve done for others.
Gratitude helps counteract the negativity bias — the tendency to focus more on the negative aspects of our experiences rather than the positive ones. This bias, also known as positive-negative asymmetry, causes people to process as many as nine bits of negative information for every positive bit that gets through. Can’t you agree that we live in a world that glorifies the negative? My friend, Stephen Kotler, calls it the “Cult of Trauma.”
Rooted in our evolutionary past, this bias once served to keep us safe by making us hyper-aware of potential dangers. However, today it often leads to unnecessary anxiety and stress. By practicing gratitude, we can begin to rewire our brains to focus more on the positive aspects of our lives, leading to greater happiness and resilience.
Stephen has done tremendous work in the field of flow neuroscience, even finding in his book, The Art of Impossible, that a daily gratitude practice can alter the brain’s negativity bias by changing the amygdala’s filter, essentially training it to take in more positive information.
In a world that often feels like it’s moving too fast, where success is measured by personal achievement rather than collective well-being, intelligent selfishness offers a different path. It recognizes that true fulfillment comes not from taking more for ourselves, but from giving more to others. Caring for others becomes a form of self-care.
So the next time you find yourself caught up in the hustle, stressed about the next milestone or achievement, take a moment to pause. Reflect on the people who have helped you along the way, the small acts of kindness that have made a difference in your life. Give thanks for those moments, and then ask yourself: How can I be intelligently selfish today? How can I contribute to the welfare of others, knowing that in doing so, I am also contributing to my own well-being?
This is the paradox of intelligent selfishness: the more we give, the more we receive. The more we invest in others, the richer our own lives become. And in a world that desperately needs more kindness, more compassion and more connection, this might just be the most intelligent way to live.