Me, Myself and I
The world we live in glorifies success—always pushing us to aim higher, be better, do more. While ambition can be a beautiful thing, the pursuit of perfection often turns into an obsession. We become so focused on being something great that we forget to be at all.
It’s as if an unspoken rule exists: only those who appear confident—bordering on arrogance—are allowed to rise. Meanwhile, the rest of us watch from below, craving what seems just out of reach. But here’s the problem: when you finally reach the top, who’s there with you? Just me, myself, and I. And as the saying goes, “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.”
So, we isolate. We convince ourselves that we are self-sufficient—that we don’t need anyone else. We feed only what we can provide for ourselves, unknowingly cutting off the richness of connection, the very thing that gives life its meaning.
We Were Never Meant to Walk Alone
If you take a step back, you’ll realize that every culture, in its own way, reflects the idea that human beings were never meant to exist alone. Even language reminds us of this truth.s
- In Japanese, the word for human—"Hito"—means interdependence.
- In Arabic, "Insaan" translates to one who seeks companionship.
- And my personal favorite, in Zulu, the word "Umuntu" (from "Ubuntu") means "I am because we are."
We were never designed to be islands. So why do we glorify individualism?
The First Step to Finding Yourself
The journey to finding yourself starts with losing the idea of yourself.
Think about it—who are you outside of the relationships that shape you? I, we, and me only make sense in the context of a bigger story.
Take a bacterium, for instance. It thrives, multiplies, and consumes all the resources in one human body, believing that this is its entire world. But if that bacterium were given the knowledge of 7+ billion humans, wouldn’t it realize that there’s more? Wouldn’t it start reaching for something beyond its tiny existence?
We are no different.
Expanding Our Perspective
As Carl Sagan once wrote, “We are like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”
Our planet is nothing more than a small speck in an endless galaxy. And in the average human lifespan, we don’t even live long enough to witness Uranus complete a single orbit around the sun.
The universe is vast, yet we get so caught up in our little world, our struggles, our ambitions. But what happens when we zoom out? What happens when we ask:
Where do I fit in all of this?
What is my purpose?
Stay tuned for Chapter 2.