The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

The dangers of people pleasing in the modern world, and what to do about it.

Be selfish. It's without a doubt the habit of highly successful hunter-gatherers I've gotten the most feedback on throughout

the last few years. The reason, I think, is that it's so unexpectedly radical, so brashly

subversive to an almost universally held tenet, good people

serve others rather than themselves. You can file it under the better to give than receive

ethic, and the general cult of self-sacrifice that permeates Western moral and work culture.

We're supposed to want to help others, to devote our lives to the

service of the greater good. To be selfish is to be shallow, vapid, a flimsy one-dimensional model of what

it means to be human. But as modestly proposed in the primal connection, we're working here with an

unfortunate distortion that can

quickly wade into treacherous, life-sucking waters. To adapt a time-old proverb, I'd say the

road to personal hell is often paved with the well-intentioned pursuit of people-pleasing.

While there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to see others happy or making a positive

difference in the world, we more quickly meet with a law of diminishing returns than we may admit.

Where does natural feel-good altruism morph into unhealthy self-sacrifice?

At what point are we denying our basic needs for the comfort and good opinions of others?

And what gets lost when we find ourselves down that dysfunctional rabbit hole?

I think a glimpse at our forebearers' reality offers an interesting perspective to all this.

Grock and his kin, after all, lived in small bands of 25 to 40 people, depending on which

anthropological analysis you read.

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