Having a coffee just now after having done the dishes, and spending almost an hour on cleaning the toilet (including the little room it is in), I came to consider that Service to Self sucks bigtime! Not only must you find a selfish based reason to justify each and every one of your actions, but that also goes for the actions that need doing, but where you have no incentive to do them for yourself…..

Let’s take cleaning the toilet for one: I’m not overly hygienophobic (or whatever the word is): Others will talk about the state of my toilet before I even feel a need to clean it up. I’m not a dirty old man, just not that panicky about germs, because I don’t believe their reputation of being there to make us sick. There are for instance plenty of examples where germs actually clean up polluted water…

But hey, back to the toilet: imagine that the above one needs cleaning. Now if you are a Service to Self kinda guy, and somebody would ask you to volunteer for this latrine duty, how would you justify wanting to do it? It can’t be because you could then use a clean toilet yourself, because it is way too big. You might be wanting to impress one of the female elephant keepers, but let’s say there aren’t any. Now doing it to please the elephant would be the most obvious Service to Others answer, but obviously being Service to Self you can’t use that…..

Obviously this challenge is too much, so let’s not be too hard on the StS people: let’s make it their normal toilet at home, which they also use. Now at least they can give the reason of wanting to go to a clean toilet, but that reason would still have to be more urgent than their dislike of cleaning toilets. Service to Others people on the other hand can immediately mention a handful of others they’d love to clean that toilet for: the frequent visitors of their home! Service to Self people can do that too, but they’d have to care about the fact that the others might appreciate a cleaned toilet… 

So in effect, there are always tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs in the Service to Self case are more complex. Thus, the people that want to keep life simple, usually go for Service to Others!

Love your Simplicity,

Dre’