Social development > self-development

n my early 20s, I was very into self-development. I meditated under a teacher, taught yoga in my community, and even wrote a self-development blog. I relied on these practices to heal from depression and anxiety after a difficult adolescence and on those fronts they helped a lot, but by my late 20s I’d taken things too far.

By then I was living in Marin County, California, surrounded by Burning Man devotees and Marianne Williamson diehards who would say things like “I feel such a deep connection with you” before never speaking to me again, or hum that “we are all one” during a mushroom trip only to never ask about my family or offer to help me move into my new home. It didn’t take me long to realize that while it might be beneficial to focus on oneself for a time, in excess it becomes straight-up narcissism.

And the world doesn’t need more self-interested people. It needs more helpful people.

I think there’s a misguided belief that self-development makes us better people. But if we want to be better people we have to focus on others, not ourselves. At some point, I realized this and changed tack. Rather than ask what I needed, I asked what my community needed. At the time, there were a lot of disadvantaged and foster youth in my area and I decided to volunteer for a youth organization. I became the head leader and spent a few years hanging out with high school kids three times a week and taking them to camp in the summer.

Very quickly, I didn’t need self-development anymore. I stopped meditating, I stopped doing yoga, I deleted my blog. The anxiety and depression that had lingered despite therapy and self-help evaporated. I was more happy than I had ever been, and making much more of a direct difference in my community. I was focusing on the needs of others rather than whatever else I could find to work on in myself, and I felt a lot of meaning and purpose in my life. It’s been close to 15 years since then and I can still say with absolute certainty: The road to inner peace is actually outer peace. It’s focusing on others.