You Think It's All About You!

and it kind of is

Think of that phrase: It’s not all about you!

That’s what somebody might say in an argument—You think everything’s about you! Carly Simon even made a hit out of it: You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you!

Nobody wants to be that person who thinks everything revolves around them.

But here’s the truth: it does.

Not because you’re vain, but because everything is about you. (Sorry, Carly. Even if you insist the song is about clouds in your coffee, it’s still about him—some say Warren Beatty.)

Without an observer—you—space-time itself has no meaning. Subatomic particles don’t even know where they are or how fast they’re moving without you. Without you, reality just swirls around in potential energy and particles. Without you, there is no color.

It’s all about you.

Every experience you’ve had—love, sex, a ripe mango, every argument—is about you. You might think you’re defending an objective position, or some moral truth, but in the end, you’re defending your own story, your sense of self.

Even altruism is a story. People who deeply believe in unselfish values are still living out their own narratives about what matters. Ideologies and beliefs are just structures built on top of stories.

But stories come first.

And stories come from desire.

Beneath everything—our impulses, our morals, our philosophies—is desire. Maybe it’s evolutionary, maybe it’s the spirit of God within us, but that desire shapes the stories we tell.

Everything comes down to what you want.

And that’s not selfish. That’s human.

But then the real question emerges:

If it’s all about you, if it’s all about what you want—
What do you want most?

Or, as Yuval Harari asks at the end of Sapiens:

What do you want to want?