No wants wants to be considered selfish - that's a painful word. But the reality is that we spent the majority of our lives being selfish - it's simply in our nature. I guess the definition and use of the word is what really matters. To me, being selfish means doing something pleasurable at the expense of others, and unfortunately so much of what we do in American society falls into that definition.

I’ve been a vegan and environmentalist for over 5 years, and both passions took a while to develop. Recently, I realized why they were so important to me - they brought me closer to purity. However, I felt that I wasn’t living as purely as I could. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, one of the definitions of the word pure is “without any extraneous and unnecessary elements”. When I stepped back and took a look at my lifestyle, I saw that there was a lot of nonessential elements - for example, I was eating food that wasn’t nutritious and was wrapped in a lot of packaging. I resolved to ask myself a question whenever I was making a decision: “do you truly need this?”  In many cases, the answer was, “no"