If you ever stumble upon a poker game, it’s easy to tell who is winning: it’s the person sitting behind the biggest pile of chips. You should view life the same way. The winner is the one with the most elaborate house, the biggest bank account, the most expensive car, the best yacht, and the storage unit for all of the toys and treats that don’t fit anywhere else.
Your objective should be to accumulate as many resources as possible. Given that accolades, money, and fame are available in finite quantities, ensure that others do not get them first. You don’t hand good cards to your opponents at the poker table, so why would you do so in real life?
There are now over seven billion people on Earth, and the most important of these must be you. Be hesitant about donating your time, money, or energy to any person, group, or cause outside yourself. Remind yourself that you are not sufficiently wealthy to scatter money hither and yon, nor so idle that you can afford to stand around ladling soup to the homeless or sandbagging someone else’s riverside home. To do so would imply that your own interests are not important—that you are not important.
At some level, deep inside, a part of you knows that you are enough and that you have enough. But if you truly believed that, what would you do? Perhaps you would begin giving it away. Money, time, energy, compassion. You might think that expending yourself for the welfare of others would ultimately help you feel impoverished again, but this tends not to work. Instead, such ill-advised generosity cultivates the part of yourself that believes in your abundance. We tend to feel wealthier by acting as though we already have more than we need.
Instead, you should jealously collect all victories, praise, and wealth to yourself. This feeds the part of us that feels impoverished and (ta dah!) makes us feel miserable.
If you live in the developed economies of the West, this cast of mind should be relatively easy to conjure and sustain. Your entire culture prepares you for it. The messages you receive help you, no matter your circumstances, to feel bereft and inferior, thus needing to focus on your own welfare before you can possibly consider anyone else’s. Although this perspective may spring from the misery we seek, it also serves to perpetuate it.
The Dalai Lama has said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” He appears to be right. One strategy for alleviating misery is to spend at least some of one’s time doing things for other people. Similarly, nothing creates a sense of greater wealth and abundance than giving money away.
We might view the Dalai Lama as our rightful enemy, but flip him on his head and he becomes our ally: “If you want others to be miserable, practice indifference. If you want to be miserable, practice indifference.” If you resolutely practice a lack of compassion, not only will you create unhappiness in yourself, but you will also enable others to experience it. This is the flip side of the wealth paradox: to create a sense of poverty, grasp what you have ever more tightly to your breast.
How can you stamp out compassion? One strategy is to view the misfortunes and unmet needs of others as being deserved. The poor are poor because they did not study and attend good universities, and they’re simply lazy anyway. The ill clearly did not take proper care of themselves. The addicted chose to do precisely what we were all warned not to do when we were children. Victims of crime should have invested in better locks. Victims of disasters should have paid attention to the warning signs.
These people are simply experiencing the consequences of their own actions. If you act to remediate the situation, they will never learn, and others will see that they need not care for themselves because do-gooders like you will jump in and help out. If this stance seems familiar, it should: it is the prime justification for a society that demands loyalty from its citizens while doing little to improve their lives in return.
A second way to overcome any natural compassion you may harbor is to view the needs of others as a bottomless pit. No matter what you do, you can’t really help anyone. Rather than taking the edge off their problems, you will only create dependence—increasing, rather than decreasing, their helplessness. Having fed the needy, their appetites will only become greater.
Finally, you can cultivate a sense of the futility of altruism by aiming high. All your life, you have watched movies in which the protagonist manages to save the world by brief and heroic action (clipping the red wire on the bomb, discovering the viral antidote, diverting the threatening asteroid). Decide that if you are going to invest your precious lifeblood in a cause, you must have the same gargantuan return. Only donate money to cancer research if it is clear that your $200 will produce the cure. Because this is manifestly unlikely, it will be easy to hold on to your time and money.
If you do get talked into helping in some way, cultivate rapid disillusionment. Point out that you spent an entire week on a housing project, and homelessness remains an issue. You sent a check for famine relief, and people are still starving. You funded your brother’s rehab, and he relapsed a year later. You spoke up at the town hall meeting, but they made the wrong decision anyway.
Tell yourself that anything you can do is only a drop in the ocean. It will not change the world, and it will not be missed if you do nothing.
Ignore the impact of collective effort—how the mutual contributions of thousands combine to create great forces of change. Devalue the beneficiaries of your own contributions. So what if you funded the education of one Nepalese child—who really cares? She and her family are insignificant to you. The ego boost of a James Bond–like impact is what you were after.
To keep water in a bucket you must plug the holes. Similarly, to retain everything for yourself you must seal off your compassion. View generosity of spirit as a weakness, and stamp it out. With it will go your humanity and any happiness that would otherwise taint your misery.