🧍 Human self-centredness

With the two boys returning to school, on their first day back from the summer holidays, I got them to run a social experiment: ask your friends how their summer was, listen attentively, and see if anyone (after they tell their stories from the summer) asks, “And what about you, how was your summer?” I’ve written before about how the world confuses empathy with God’s design for compassion — and this little experiment showed my boys exactly why. I also told my boys in advance that I expect no one in their peer group to ask that question.

Sure enough, that evening they came home and said no one in their classes asked them back how their summers were. I told them that this was a valuable lesson they learned, namely that all humans are fundamentally self-centred. We love to tell our own stories but are not genuinely interested to hear the others’. This is who we are. And that is precisely why Paul’s words in Philippians 2 cut so deep — and why I’ve come to see what love actually looks like when the Kingdom comes as the only antidote.

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 2:3–5 (NKJV)