It turns out that when parents and educators send children the message that their needs and their individual happiness and dreams are more important than other things, like being a compassionate, ethical, hard-working person, it makes them unhappy. People who have been told to put themselves and their needs first29 feel empty and discontented, and dissatisfied with themselves because they feel they deserve to be special rather than accepting and understanding the ways that our ordinariness connects us to other human beings.
