Planning is Selfish

Planning for any reason is selfish. If you make a plan it means you have an agenda and all agenda's are ultimately self-serving. Whether or not your plan benefits others your actions will still benefit yourself in status and reputation. There is no way to plan unselfishly. Any act of pure selflessness must be unplanned and spontaneous. It has to be in the moment or else you have sowed the seeds of intent to reap personal rewards.

There is no such thing as a selfless plan. You plan to give a loved one a present at great cost to yourself, but in the back of your mind you still look forward to that personal gratification at knowing you made them happy, or knowing that they love you more. Some may argue that the personal gain in giving can be smaller than the personal profit, even when planned but do we not almost always go into gift-giving assuming that our gift will be reciprocated equally. We exchange presents during the holidays, usually of equal monetary value. Plans are selfish, giving is selfish.

If we strive for selflessness we should strive to one day take a bullet for someone in the heat of the moment. But here we are planning yet again. Don't stress about your planning; though it may be selfish, you are impossibly easy to sabotage if you lead a life without plans. Total spontaneity is not an easy thing to achieve, and selflessness is overrated. Selflessness feels good after the fact, but then you could get a similar feeling from selfish giving. You won't be an enlightened being, but that's life, we can't all be perfect.

Unfortunately you also can't plan to be spontaneous. The only way you'll ever achieve that goal is if you accidentally fall into a coma, but then what's worse than not being spontaneous, being predictable. Even this blog was planned, technically, I had a conversation with a friend about how plans are selfish. He suggested I write a book about it. I said I thought about it, and he told me that he smelled a plan coming on. There's the sabotage.

Well, this was pointless. I just stated something everyone already knew. That planning is good. Except I put a spin on it and said that plans are selfish, but still important, because there is no other way to live. If anyone reads this, they'll think I'm an idiot. If you're reading this, post a comment.