On Making Sure Everyone Is Taken Care Of

Published on Feb 9, 2025, filed under philosophy, politics, misc. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon or on Bluesky.)

Here’s something we should all broadcast, all the time.

The only path to individual well-being and lasting peace is to make sure everyone is taken care of.

When I first drafted this post, I felt I’d be charging through many of your open doors, and we’d only need to establish that some people don’t think like we do.

But this idea that the only path to individual well-being and lasting peace is to make sure everyone is taken care of, probably is a bit counter-intuitive (and personally, I also still learn and work on fully embracing it).

Individual Contentment Does Not Exist in a Silo

The counter-intuitive part is not about peace—although there’s always one or more nations that believes in lasting peace by killing everyone from another nation (the opposite of taking care of them), it’s about individual well-being.

This is easiest to explain with an extreme: Imagine you were the only content person on this planet. Could this really last? Could this really be?

No—because inevitably, the discontent of everyone else would make you discontent, too, in a myriad of possible ways.

It is the same with larger number of people who managed to be content. It is the same if everyone but one person was content—they could not be (and an advanced civilization would not choose to).

This is not new. I recall Michael Roach, in How Yoga Works (2004):

[…] the great error of humankind which has kept us constantly in misery, since our kind began […], is that we separate our happiness from the happiness of others.

But it doesn’t just bear repeating—it bears constant broadcasting, that:

The only path to individual well-being and lasting peace is to make sure everyone is taken care of.

Everyone Means Everyone

It’s crucial, too, that everyone is everyone:

Women and men and people who choose differently, children and seniors, black people and white people and everyone on the beautiful spectrum, Republicans and Democrats, Palestinians and Israelis, Russians and Ukrainians, Southern and Northern Koreans, liberals and fascists, people of every sexual orientation, people of every religion, people of every ideology,—we need to take care of everyone.

(And it really is everyone, even if we want to shoot a good number of people and organizations into the sun. They may not look like it, but they need love.)

But if you doubt that, if our neighbor doubts that, if anyone doubts that, perhaps feels repulsed by that, we aren’t even on the way there.

Everyone, without exception, needs to be taken care of.

Every single one.

And because that needs everyone to care and take care (many of who probably—and fortunately—would), we need to spread this simple idea, as a precondition for lasting peace—and really, actually, and most definitely, our own individual well-being. We depend on everyone, and everyone depends on us.

PS.
You know, I’ve been writing posts like this for some time, and if you wonder why I’m doing this, who I was, then yes, I ask myself the same thing. But everyone who writes things like this will respond, because there are too few people doing so, least of all our political and economical leadership. (We’re experiencing a full-blown leadership crisis on all levels.) So if you really wonder, why people like I write about things like this, then go there. Ask our national and international leadership about it. Help to make sure no one has to share basic truths like this one—because truths shouldn’t need grassroots efforts, and I, and many others who write things like this, would actually love to stop sharing, well, reminders.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you’ve never heard of, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also with respect to politics and philosophy. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my experiences and perspectives. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, but do be critical.)