When the Needs of the "Me" Outweigh the Needs of the "We"

     Our society overall is constantly shifting, changed by things such as technology and economic cycles. This is a natural occurrence, as it should be because nothing can progress while staying the same. However, as well all should know, not all of the changes are positive ones. Granted, this can often be a matter of perspective, but I believe that there are some that tend to be negative regardless. For now, the focus will be on one in particular that affects many others. No matter the situation or setting, there seems to be a growing and dangerous problem. The problem is that in many aspects of our lives, regardless of age, the needs of the "me" seem to be outweighing the needs of the "we".

     While this problem may sound bad right off because I've said that it is, it needs explaining in order to be understood and dealt with. When I talk about the needs of the "me" versus the needs of the "we" I'm referring to what is beneficial and needed for our individual selves versus the community we're in or even overall society. If you have a situation where you may be able to gain while others don't because you're focused on your needs, but you could instead help a group of others gain while you don't gain as much, you have a conflict. For the most part, our natural response is to help ourselves first before focusing on others. There are many times where this is good or even necessary such as when you're on a plane and the oxygen masks drop down, you're instructed to put yours on first before helping others or else you could end up both without air. The problem is when this kind of thinking and acting goes too far and we forget others all together. When we perceive that our needs are the only needs and that others needs are unimportant or even obstacles to our own, things start to fall apart.

     If you reflect on our society today, the instances where this problem makes itself known aren't that hard to find. Let's start off with an easy one that I've had to hold off criticism from, being a business person myself, and that is with corporations and overall for-profit businesses. The main goal of a public corporation financially is to maximize shareholder value. This seems simple enough but the problem comes in the means of how this is accomplished. Often times, as we saw in the housing bubble crash in 08, companies become so focused on earning profits and meeting their numbers that they forget that they're not alone. When this happens, companies lose sight of the fact that they only exist because customers are buying their product or service. If they suck their customers dry and cause their economic situations to collapse, the direct impact will be felt when people stop coming through the door. Thankfully, a trend that is growing is that people are putting their dollars into companies that are focused on benefiting society overall. More and more firms are proving that you can in fact have a double bottom line, one for the company and one for the community in which they're based. An important thing to remember with this is that companies can often become the scapegoat when really, they can't survive unless we as consumers continue to feed them our dollars.

     Another major and easy target for when looking for where this issue is occurring is within the political realm. Time and time again we see, hear, or read about a politician that has become corrupt. Despite their original best intentions, they've become caught up in some scandal or scheme that's aimed at improving their power or wealth at the cost of their constituents. The unique format of our governmental structure is that it's designed to be representative of the people, where our opinions and needs are voiced and addressed, at least that's the intention. The problem comes when those representatives get off track and have the needs of their "me" more important than the needs of our "we". The tricky part of that though is determining what exactly are the needs of the "we", since many of us can have conflicting ideas of what those are, as most of us well know. However, often times as an overall whole, even if it doesn't seem like it, we get what we ask for. If you look at our government and think it's dysfunctional and wonder why there's so much gridlock, just take a look at things such as online comment boards on a political news article or reflect back on arguments you've had with others on political topics. I'm willing to bet that if I said that Obamacare was the greatest thing ever, I'd get uproar, positive and negative, from you all as my readers that you wouldn't believe. In fact, I bet many of you just now started firing off thoughts in your mind as to why I would be right on target with that statement or way off the mark to the point where I don't even know what the target looks like. But, politically charged statements such as that one are basically begging for controversy as they always have and will be. It's important to look beyond our own needs, and even the needs of our own families, to the potential benefits to our society as a whole. If there's a regulation put into place that hurts your own pocket but makes our country better as a whole, preference usually must be given. Granted, thing are never that clean cut and I'm not saying they will ever be, but hopefully you understand the point.

     Now I'll get into a couple of smaller instances that, while may be not as large scale, are still very prevalent situations where I encounter this problem in on a daily basis. The first of these is when it comes to driving. For those of us who drive on public roads we should know that the roads are indeed just that, public roads. This means that you do not own the road and most likely you're not the only one on it. Accidents often happen when drivers believe that their "me" needs of where they're going outweigh the "we" needs of everyone getting where they're going safely. I know from a lot of observation while on the roads that it takes an incredible amount of engineering to make traffic flow in an efficient manner, but all of that becomes worthless when someone decides that their needs put them above the rules of the road. The D.C. area is infamous for its amount of traffic and horrible drivers because of this. When one driver causes an accident due to this issue that shuts down part of a road, hundreds if not thousands of others have to pay the consequences, which can often compound into others becoming frustrated and causing more of the problem and so on. Remember while driving that although you make think you can do something, the laws of physics don't change and you're on roads with a lot of other drivers that can't read your mind and anticipate what you want to do.

     A final example comes from my main hobby and is actually the area where I see it most frequently, the place that frustrates me the most, and is the original source of why I wanted to write this particular post. I am of course talking about video gaming, more specifically in a multiplayer fashion. A few of the games I play the most often with others include Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, and Age of Empires. For those who don't know these games, what I'm about to say can be applied to any kind of competitive team game or sport. Time and time again when playing these games, those playing love to talk about how great they're doing or have done if the game is over. From "check out how much damage I dealt" to "look at my score" to even "well, that was good, but look at what I did", the amount of self promotion in these games never stops. Often times a part of this is because you're playing with random other people who you don't know, but even among good friends the focus of a team win or loss often ends up on the individuals. Of course, a team is made up of individuals, but it takes the combined efforts of everyone playing together to achieve victory. Many times in TF2 or LoL players like to go solo and try to show off just what they can do or act flashy so that they get the credit. More often than not though, this works against them and their team because while they may do some damage and get a couple of kills, overall their team ends up losing more than that one individual gained. This can often cause the team effort to fall apart and turn into a blame game because the individual is asking the others why they aren't as good as they are while the team is asking the individual to stop trying to be a solo superhero.

     The reason this is especially prevalent in online gaming is that the individual trying to "go huge" is often someone somewhere hiding behind their keyboard that you'll never see again as soon as the game is over. Accountability is non-existent and players don't feel the needs to care about another player. In this case, the needs of their "me" of trying to be flashy and look cool outweigh the needs of the "we" of the team playing together to win. This dynamic changes among friends because most likely you'll still be interacting after the game is over and therefore your perception of that individual as being selfish and a poor team player lingers on when you go to play with them again. One of my best online buds is someone that I met through a random server that I happened to be playing in one night back in 2009. The reason this friendship even exists and he is someone I'd rather play with in a game than some of my other friends is because he understands and plays in a manner that shows it's better for the "we" to work together to win rather than the individual "me" to do a lot on their own. When you look at any kind of team game or sport, those that win and do it consistently are the ones who have team chemistry, not the ones who throw a bunch of selfish stars together and call it a team.

     Perhaps this problem has made itself more and more apparent to me because I've been trained in a sense to see it occurring. What I mean by this, is that my father has told me many stories of his time growing up where he and his siblings would join with others up and down the road, all working together to get farm work done and bring in the harvest, regardless of whether or not the harvest was actually theirs. There was work to be done and they didn't care that they weren't directly benefiting from it, they just had neighbors in need and hands to spare. He was actually the one that coined the title phrase of this post, as least as far as I know, and has raised me in a way to be aware of situations and to be always working for the good of the "we", not just the "me". Being someone who is highly observant and seeing things such as the widening of the wealth gap and increasingly individualistic nature of our society, I'm glad to have this background so that I can work to combat the problem through all that I'm doing.

     We all live in the same world, have the same basic needs, and usually have some dependence on someone else to allow for the lives that we live. So how, I ask, do we forget this basic concept? In most situations, more is accomplished by working together with others to achieve a common goal than we could ever do on our own. We were made to live in community with others while interacting, learning and growing because of it. For those of us who are Christian, we should know that in Mark 12, Christ commands as the second yet equally most important command to love our neighbor as ourselves. As I've shown in this post, we have the love ourselves part down, but what about our neighbors?

     When someone asks if you have time to talk or even seems like they need someone just to comfort them, really consider your priorities before saying you don't have the time. If someone needs help on a task, even if you feel they should know what they're doing, it's usually more beneficial for the both of you if you actually lend a hand instead of criticizing them for their apparent lack of skill or knowledge. When you're playing a team game or a sport and someone is dragging your team down, take the time to see what's going wrong and give them some advice, or better yet, show them what they can do differently. If you actually want to see a change occur, start by making it happen in your everyday interactions with others. The goal is to raise all others up and to become a better society through the contributions of all, not to push others down and create better lives for ourselves alone, especially since this kind of thinking and acting can't last for long.

     This is not a problem that our government can regulate us out of, nor is it one that we can all read about here and simply say that we won't do it anymore. With a post like this, people can also become defensive, trying to mentally reason out why what they're doing is fine or that this isn't a problem in their lives. In fact, some of you have probably already done this and are now catching yourselves having done just that. A disclaimer with this post especially, as with all of my posts, is that I do not claim to perfectly live up to what I'm writing. I can tell you now that I often am focused on what's best for me rather than the overall good, as is human nature. The caveat to that though is that I'm becoming more and more aware of these situations occurring and doing all I can to change my thoughts and actions while in the midst of them. After all, that is the point of these blogs that I write; not to criticize or speak down from a pedestal to my readers, but to challenge all of you to internalize what I've written and begin to make changes in your own lives for the better. If I see or hear of just one person who has read my blog posts and made a change for the better because of it, then all of my time and effort in writing these posts is worth it, especially since all of this started with just a thought.