Jason Whittle

What kind of selfish do you want to be?

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Most of us grow up hearing that selfishness is bad. We’re told to put others first, to be generous, to sacrifice. On the surface, that sounds like the opposite of selfishness. But if you look one layer deeper, something interesting shows up: everything we do, even the noble stuff, is ultimately tied to how it makes us feel. In that sense, pure “selflessness” starts to look like an illusion — what we call selfless is just a particular style of selfishness that takes other people’s wellbeing into account.

That doesn’t mean we’re secretly monsters. It just means we’re human. We naturally move toward what feels better and away from what feels worse. Even when we choose the hard option, we usually do it because, compared to the alternatives, it’s the one that lets us live with ourselves.

In this piece, I want to argue that:

Every action we take can be traced back, somehow, to how it makes us feel.
Even martyr-like sacrifices are still attempts to optimise for our own overall wellbeing.
Sometimes doing the “right thing” still feels bad — but it’s the least-bad option on the emotional graph.
The best we can do is align our selfishness with the sustainable wellbeing of conscious creatures.
Feeling guilty about that kind of selfishness doesn’t make sense, and actually makes the world worse.

Selfishness as our default setting

At the most basic level, we’re all running on reward and avoidance. We move toward pleasure, meaning, relief, approval, connection, and away from pain, shame, fear, and loneliness. Every choice is, in some way, a bet about which option will feel least bad or most worthwhile over time.

Think about everyday examples:

You help a friend move house. It’s tiring and inconvenient, but you do it because you care about them, you’d want help if the roles were reversed, and you like being the kind of person who shows up.
You donate to charity. You might genuinely care about the cause — and it also relieves guilt, gives you a sense of meaning, or fits your identity as a “good person”.
You’re a smart teacher who could earn more elsewhere, but you stay in a stressful, underpaid school because you care about your students, you believe education matters, and you like seeing yourself as someone who shows up for kids who don’t have many chances.

All of these are “unselfish” on the surface, but inside they are tightly connected to how you feel about yourself and your life. If helping your friend move made you feel used, resentful, and unseen, you’d be far less likely to keep doing it.

This doesn’t make the action fake or cynical. It just means that your inner emotional landscape is always part of the equation.

When sacrifice is secretly self-serving

Some actions look almost saintly from the outside: the parent who works two jobs for their kids, the activist who risks jail, the person who donates a kidney to a stranger. It’s tempting to say, “That’s pure selflessness.”

But if you ask those people why they did it, their answers usually point back to inner experience:

“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”
“I’d rather suffer than watch them suffer.”
“It gave my life meaning.”
“I just knew I’d regret it if I walked away.”

These are selfish emotional reasons. The sacrifice hurts in one sense (time, money, comfort, even safety), but it reduces a deeper kind of pain or creates a deeper kind of fulfilment. They’re optimising for their own best possible internal state given the situation.

A clear example:

Imagine a whistleblower in a company who exposes serious abuse. They lose their job, some friends turn against them, and they’re dragged through legal and social stress. On paper, they’ve blown up their own life. But inside, they might feel a fierce sense of integrity: “At least I did the right thing. I can look in the mirror.”

From the outside: martyr. From the inside: still a kind of selfishness — not shallow comfort, but a commitment to living in a way they can emotionally tolerate.

When doing the right thing still feels bad

So what about the times where doing the “right thing” doesn’t feel good at all? Where every option seems awful?

This is where it helps to think in terms of a feeling graph. Imagine all your choices plotted on a graph of “how you’ll feel over time”. Sometimes, every available choice sits in the negative part of that graph. There is no happy option — only less-bad ones.

Consider this scenario:

You have an older relative — say an uncle — who is lonely, negative, and not very pleasant to be around. He has no close friends, few hobbies, and almost never leaves the house. When you visit, the conversation is draining and you leave feeling flat. When you don’t visit, you lie awake worrying about him sitting there alone.

Whichever way you go, you’re going to feel bad. If you keep visiting, you sign up for a series of evenings that aren’t enjoyable. If you stop, you get short-term relief from the visits but a steady background hum of guilt and concern about his wellbeing.

There is no feel-good option here, only less-bad ones. On the feeling graph, visiting semi-regularly might still be a local maximum — the least-bad path over time. You absorb some discomfort during each visit, but you avoid the deeper, more persistent unease of abandoning him completely. You also give him at least a small lifeline of human contact.

This is still a selfish choice in a broad sense: you are trying to minimise the emotional cost to yourself over time. It just happens to be a form of selfishness that also supports another conscious creature’s wellbeing.

Aligning selfishness with the wellbeing of conscious creatures

If we accept that we are always selfish — that every action is, in some way, about how we feel — then the question becomes: what should we do with that fact?

One answer is: don’t fight it, aim it.

Imagine a world where people openly embraced their selfishness, but defined “feeling good” in a richer way:

Businesses realised that long-term profit comes from genuinely improving people’s lives and protecting the environment, not exploiting them.
Governments recognised that their own stability and legacy depend on raising the wellbeing of all citizens, not just staying in power.
Individuals found that the deepest, most durable form of personal happiness comes from contribution, fairness, and kindness, not just short-term hits of pleasure.

In that world, people would still be selfish — they’d still be chasing their own sense of meaning, security, and joy. But they’d understand that the most reliable way to feel good over time is to help create a world where other conscious creatures can feel good too.

Your wellbeing is not separate from the wellbeing of others; it’s intertwined with it. A society full of frightened, desperate, mistreated people is a miserable place to live, even for the “winners”.

So the project is not to eradicate selfishness, but to align it with the sustainable wellbeing of conscious creatures: humans, animals, and future people who will inherit what we build or destroy.

Why feeling guilty about “good selfishness” backfires

Here’s the twist: if selfishness is unavoidable, then feeling guilty simply for having self-interest — even when it’s aligned with the greater good — is not noble. It’s wasteful.

Imagine a society where people have internalised the message that any self-interest is shameful:

A nurse feels guilty for taking a holiday, even though rest would make her a better caregiver.
An engineer feels bad about negotiating a fair salary for building clean energy solutions, because he “shouldn’t care about money”.
A parent feels selfish for carving out time to exercise and see friends, and ends up burnt out, impatient, and resentful with their kids.

In each case, their “selfish” action — rest, fair pay, personal time — actually supports their ability to do good in the world. Yet they feel bad for taking it. If everyone lived like this, we’d see burnout, hidden resentment, and quiet collapse everywhere.

Now flip it:

Imagine a world where people are taught: “Of course you’re selfish. So is everyone else. The real question is: what kind of selfish do you want to be?”

In that world, the nurse takes her holiday without shame, knowing her rested self gives better care. The engineer asks for decent pay, knowing it keeps him in a role that reduces carbon emissions. The parent looks after their own body and mind, knowing their kids benefit from a present, emotionally regulated adult.

No halos, no martyrdom — just honest, aligned self-interest that lifts everyone.

Feeling guilty for this kind of selfishness doesn’t make you more moral. It just drains the very energy you need to keep contributing.

Bringing it back to everyday life

If this is right — if everything we do is, at some level, about how we feel — then maybe the goal is not to pretend we’re selfless, but to:

Be honest about our motives.
Expand our idea of what “feels good” to include long-term, shared wellbeing.
Drop the pointless shame about wanting our own life to go well.

You will never stop caring about how you feel. That’s built in. But you can choose to care in a way that includes others instead of excluding them.

We are all selfish. The real question is whether we will be small selfish — chasing short hits of comfort at any cost — or big selfish: aligning our own happiness with the durable wellbeing of the conscious creatures we share this world with.

And choosing the second one isn’t just nothing to be ashamed of — it’s the only reasonable option. It’s the path to a better world, both for us as individuals and for all concious creatures.

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