A short spoken piece arguing that the secret to individual and collective happiness is being of service to others. The speaker claims that purpose, joy, and personal growth come from helping others and critiques modern cultural focus on personal achievement and self-aggrandizement, urging people to offer themselves to the world to create greater happiness.
Chapters
I think that helping other people is the secret to happiness. And I think that the only reason that we haven't really acknowledged that broadly, even as you said, despite the abundance of research that shows how powerful it is to be of service to others, is because it's so counterculture to the way that we have been socialized into looking at ourselves and our lives. So really the argument that I make is that the purpose of life is found in being of service to others. The joy of life is found in being service to others. The growth of you as an individual is found in being of service to others others. And we are struggling as individuals and as a society because we have sidelined that as a nice to have in favor of personal growth and personal achievement and self glorification and aggrandization. And instead we need to focus on taking ourselves and offering them up to the world. And the more that we can do that, not only the happier we become, but also we make other people happier too. And so that's how we can create a happier world.