I was recently asked to run for my institutions’ Rank and Tenure committee. For reasons that are beside the point of the current topic, I decided to decline, though I’ve been interested in the work for a while. I told the elections representative some other assignments I’d be willing to do. I never heard back.

The draft ballot for the first round of committee elections came out, and not surprisingly, I wasn’t on it. I’m still chairing my department for one more year, so if I didn’t nominate myself for something, I’d still be doing some service. Still, I wrestled with whether to volunteer. There are lots of people on these campuses who do well more than their share of service, and many who don’t do nearly their share. I don’t want to fall into the latter category. I don’t really want to fall into the former category either, though I’d rather err in that direction. Things need doing, I can do them, therefore I should do them. Right?

Of course we can’t do everything it would be worth doing. That’s the project of life: choosing which of the many sparkly and not-so-sparkly possibilities stretching in front of us we will spend our droplets of time on.

Writing about beauty, diligence, stuff and clutter in recent weeks has me thinking about how I—and apparently others—experience the world as full of demands, or at least calls for our attention. I suspect not everyone experiences the world this way. But I speculate that for those who do, the reasons are connected to having a relational orientation toward life.

Here’s what this is like for me: the world makes demands on you because you perceive it as full of value, mostly (but not always—beauty is one exception) tied to the people you care about. It’s also connected to the value of causes or principles you believe in, which are also mostly tied to people. And you’re aware of people’s dependence on you (as well as your dependence on them) and don’t want to let anyone down. This is why it’s hard to let go when life throws you a curve ball and you have to rearrange your plans. And hard to take breaks to rest. And hard to say no when people ask you to do (all the) things.

I venture that I’m not the only person who experiences the world this way. The “stretched utilitarian” character from my diligence post surely does as well—and I know many people who fit this profile. I recently had a conversation with a colleague in which we applied my clutter diagnosis not only to our physical stuff, but to the service work we do within our faculty jobs. One reason—the reason?—we take on too much is that we get caught in the thought that because the work is (or would be) valuable, we need to do it. What if there were ways to honor that value that didn’t involve our doing it? (That’s not an easy question to answer. But I like how it shifts our thinking.)

I link the experience of the world as value-filled and making demands on us to a relational understanding of humanity. When you think of yourself in terms of how you’re connected to the world around you—the planet and its inhabitants, both human and non-human; our natural and constructed worlds—your sense of your own interests expands to include those of the people and things you’re related to.

It seems to me there are lots of people out there who don’t feel the tug of value in this way. Those people, it seems to me, are able to insulate themselves from the call of anything not related to their narrow self-interest. It’s a primary form of egoism, connected to a belief in the fundamental separateness of persons, a core tenet of individualism.

We’re taught to believe that the latter is the default state, but as feminist philosophers have been saying for decades, it isn’t. The belief comes from the ideals that go with individualism, distorted by the interests of people with power and taken to their natural conclusions. I think it’s time we recognize that what might actually be the default is the relational orientation, which gets damaged or destroyed depending on life experiences (including especially the kind of care we receive in our first three years, but also ideology).

Someone who thinks of themselves—the thought might not be fully conscious—as highly interconnected with others will naturally treat any (even trivial) question or request as placing some obligation on them: even if they say no, they’ll feel the need to at least provide a reason why not.1 This is, as I see it, a way of honoring the perceived connection between the requester and the addressee (which may only exist in virtue of the request, for instance between strangers). Someone who understands themselves as less connected to others will not feel this same sense of needing to answer to a requester with a reason.2 Without a sense of connection, they don’t feel a question as any kind of even mild obligation.

Furthermore, even when there’s no request in place, those with a relational mindset are oriented toward the care of others, which focuses on attending to their needs. Perception of need will thus lead to a sense of obligation for a relational person in a position to provide some kind of care. Even those with highly individualist outlooks in the abstract will help people directly in front of them with clear and immediate needs.

Not all values are related to other people, however; beauty is a prime example. In fact, one of the ways beauty has been characterized historically has to do with its independence from individual interests. And even egoists respond to values like beauty. Natural beauty—take a sunset, for instance—tends to appeal to everyone, at least, and nature is there doing its thing independently of our interest in its doing so. Admiring a sunset or a flower is one way of pulling us out of our own little worlds, reminding us that we’re not the only things in existence. Beauty is an antidote to “practical solipsism,” the egoistic idea that you are the only source of value in your world.

And so I think it’s there in pretty much all of us, this relational understanding of ourselves. Despite the way the history of philosophy has unfolded to highlight the roots of individualism and hide the roots of relational thinking, this relational outlook also has deep roots. Some are more keenly tuned into it than others. In a contemporary world that’s in the grip of individualsim run amok, we need to tap into those deep, caring roots. It’s what will save us.

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