How much do your own wants / wishes weigh versus the collective wants of those closest to you?
It’s complicated.
With family and friends I make an instinctive distinction between wants and needs, and in social situations find myself wanting what others need - in my youth this could be a fault as much as a blessing, because I could sacrifice my own peace of mind that way. I can find myself needing others' neediness which can be a problem because I can become dependent on it.
Socially, I’m a natural follower and I’m quite happy to go along with the crowd in many social situations.
I have found that few folks are drawn to what I need and I hate imposing, so I don’t tend to negotiate if there is a clash. I don’t get any satisfaction and a lot of discomfort out of winning on wants, so I’ll mostly just withdraw rather than push it. I’ll go along with others but metaphorically haunt the dawn and evening twilight, when there’s no one else about, to meet my own wants. As I’ve got older, there’s more dawn and twilight in my day than there used to be.
In general my wife and I have pretty similar needs and we line up ok on the whole. She has significant medical problems and deep needs related to those - I find it very easy to want what she needs, but I can easily get emotionally drained by it.
We are both intuitive introverts, living in our own heads a lot, and it’s easy to find lots of time in the day to follow our our own stuff.
At the level of society I tend to treat it like I do a landscape. It’s easier to go round or over a mountain rather than through it. I prefer landscapes that have been shaped naturally than ones that have been hacked about artificially and I have a strong aversion to social engineering.
I find it hard to work out what it would mean to balance my own wants against those of society as a whole, and quickly get lost in the labyrinth. What does it mean? My local town? My country? The world? Now, or 100 or 1000 years from now? How would I defer my own wants for those of society? If I try and consume differently or less, for example, so as to help with climate control, and as a result take away the livelihood of some guy in a third world country, is this a good balance? The scientists change their minds all the time as well, so I could spend 10 years setting something I want aside only to find that it was useless because they all change their minds about what could be effective.
So I tend to treat society like I do the fixed stars, as something that I have only a little influence on, and it's to be lived with rather than otherwise. How to live with it - the easiest way I've found is through tything. By that I mean setting aside a fairly specific contribution of giving, both in time and money, and focus these on concrete and immediate wants in society rather than abstract or debatable ones.
I live in a relatively wealthy, liberal country and I'm getting older too with less future to worry about than I once had, and less energy too. If I were younger, or lived in a less congenial society then I would probably have a different orientation.
