Bring Them Home a Souvenir

9/10/2026

"I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much."

Our society, and America as a collective, has an obsession with internal spotlights.

Our occupation, address, self-perceived status. We pride ourselves on being the wisest, richest, most valuable person in every room. Self-obsession disguised as ambition.

This might be understandable if this self-obsession occurred in one individual out of every hundred, but we are all guilty of abandoning one another to follow our own self-interest.

We are all thinking too much about ourselves.

When caught in our own whirlwind, we lose sight of those around us. Whether it's our closest friends, or people experiencing hardship across the world who we will never meet. Self-indulgence can come at the cost of empathy and consideration.

This is to say, maybe the antidote isn't to think less about ourselves. Maybe it's to give ourselves more reasons to think about other people.

Think about the last time you went somewhere without someone you loved. You see something strange in a little shop, or taste something you know your friend would love, or walk down a street so beautiful you wish someone else could see it. And suddenly, for a moment, your experience isn't entirely yours anymore.

You buy the little ceramic dish. The postcard. The keychain you would never buy for yourself.

A souvenir.

The strange thing about a souvenir is that it asks you to interrupt your own experience in order to include someone else's. You are having the time of your life, and yet you are thinking about someone who isn't there.

I wonder if this is the concept we are lacking and depriving ourselves of. Not more trinkets, necessarily. More reasons to look outside ourselves.

And I think this shows up in a hundred little ways: a life of letting other people into your own world.

Seeing a movie and thinking of someone who would love it. Bringing someone their favorite pastry without being asked. Learning a new language because your lover's family speaks it. Seeing someone struggling and allowing their existence to interrupt your own day. Traveling and realizing you are experiencing a place for two, even though you're physically alone.

Selflessness isn't necessarily sacrificing yourself. Sometimes it's making room for someone else in your consciousness.

You see, hear, taste something wonderful and, instead of asking what it means for you, you think about who you could bring it home to.

Maybe this is what I mean when I say we are thinking about ourselves too much.

Not that we should stop knowing ourselves. Not that ambition is inherently selfish, or that wanting a beautiful life is something to apologize for. I like beautiful things. I want a life that feels like mine.

But I don't want to become so occupied with building a life that I forget to notice the people living beside me.

I want to be interrupted.

Maybe we could all stand to bring home something small enough to fit in our pocket.

Something that says:

I was thinking about you while I was out there living my life.

Because perhaps the opposite of self-obsession isn't thinking nothing of yourself.

Maybe it's remembering that you are not the only person here.

Evidence that, somewhere in the middle of your own life, you remembered somebody else's.