Another aspect of the narcissistic personality – finding oneself for the wrong reason or finding oneself, looking for oneself in the wrong way – is that the purpose of life gets lost, and increasingly the purpose of life becomes survival. Just survive; live as long as you can regardless of the quality of your life. The majority of the costs of health care are devoted to the very last stages of life; that’s when you become really expensive. A lot of people are making money out of it, of course. Pharmaceutical companies and medical professions and medical institutions, they make a lot of money out of this. But it becomes increasingly unsustainable and unjust, because that money could be given, could be spread out. Imbalance of the way we allocate our resources is what is being exposed here. And behind that loss of values and inverted values is the loss of a sense of the goal of life, both for the individual and for the species. It becomes just about survival, if you can afford it, rather than about living one’s term of life to the full. So this is something of what I think the general context of what finding ourself might mean.
| ( Finding Oneself 1 Laurence Freeman ) |
