Surely This Is All for Me
When Rust Cohle says,
“Surely this is all for me?! Me. Me me me, I, I’m so fucking important! I’m so fucking important, right?!”
it sounds like satire. An exaggerated parody of ego. But living in the West long enough, it starts to feel less like a joke and more like an accurate illustration of how quietly life is organized. Everything becomes personal (my progress, my productivity, my purpose) as though life itself was a performance review. The line, in the venomous sarcasm of True Detective, lingers not due to it being profound but because of its painful familiarness.
In particular, to a large extent, I didn’t realize that I did not appreciate it at first. Western life does not announce its philosophy. It integrates it into routines, work calendars, gym schedules and productivity systems, self-improvement conversations, morning habits and five-year plans. The self becomes the center of meaning, the very thing to be continually enhanced, rationalized, polished. No longer is worth assumed; every single day it is earned. If you’re tired, it’s that you didn’t optimize. If you are anxious, it is because you have not built an orderly life or aren’t making enough goals. If you are behind, it is due to your failure to execute on your goals. Within this community, not only is individuality valued, it is moralized. Discipline becomes virtue. Output becomes character. Busyness is an indication of seriousness. Rest, too, must justify itself in the sense of enhancing performance in future.
Life begins to feel like a project all by yourself and you also became both product and manager, checking-ins for every inefficiency in your own work.
What impressed me most is that this logic penetrates everything and includes religion deeply. I’ve noticed that despite the fact that a significant number of the religious people in my immediate vicinity sincerely believe in God, they still make a self-appointment in efficiency. Faith is yet another field of optimization: on reliability, a disciplined growth, self-improvement, private battle. There’s community, but frequently at the margins. Spiritual life is something you do on your own, judged only by how well you do it, not in the closet. The language moves subtly from being responsible, as a default of others, to mastery of the self. Yet it is deeply illogical to assume that spirituality (in almost any tradition) is about individualism; it has always been about collectivism, about lifting the community as a whole so that everyone’s life improves together.
A big change that I’ve seen in Muslim youth is even though, deeply, they understand that Islam is about collective improvement, there is an obsession with going to the gym. Not because it will improve your health but because it will improve your self-aesthetics. The gym becomes less a means for community well-being, or even maintaining the body as an amanah (trust) from God, and more a tool for maximizing visual self-worth, documenting progress, narrating a personal “transformation.” The same logic that applies to professional growth (“be the best version of yourself”) seeps quietly into spiritual and physical life: you are responsible for optimizing every aspect of yourself, and worth is measured in before-and-after stories that are told primarily for, and by, the self.
This is not to minimize physical health or discipline. Islam does teach strength, resilience, striving to improve a healthy life is praiseworthy, and effort is part of the tradition. But the current obsession often distorts the meaning: fitness as self-display, achievement as an Instagram highlight, self-improvement as self-absorption under the guise of discipline. Even acts of worship and charity are sometimes privately tallied up, not as ways to uplift others, but as metrics for personal spiritual “progress.” Without noticing, the framework subtly shifts from, “How can I contribute to my community?” to “How well am I performing as an individual?”
The line between discipline and narcissism blurs when everything, even the highest ideals, become raw material for building the self and the wider purpose is lost in the quest for self-perfection.
Then I traveled back home (Saudi Arabia, where I grew up and India, where my parents grew up and where my extended family is). Leaving it (even if only momentarily) caused a kind of cognitive whiplash. Meeting with friends and family who live side by side reminded me how strange my baseline had been. Life there was not a project to be defined around the self. Meals were shared without planning ahead of time. Time was porous. People were outside of each other’s space without needing to negotiate with one another constantly. Worth was not something to be proved. By virtue of presence, was presumed.
No one inquired about what I was constructing. No one measured my output. No one wanted me to explain away why I had a rest. What surprised me the most had not been the absence of self-inflicted pain that comes with individual ambition (people worked hard) but the absence of self-narration. Life was no longer a tale being told about oneself day and night. There was less obsession with identity, less anxiety about trajectory. Problems were shared. Joy was shared. Even suffering was a far lighter-hearted thing when shared out among a community and not carried privately. This juxtaposition forced me to confront something uncomfortable: how much of the feeling of inner tension I harboured, however, was self-imposed, and not a product of personal failure, but due, to the moral framework I had subsumed in.
In the West, individualism offers a promise of freedom, but also serves to withdraw insulation, a hidden retreat from which we may slip. When it is the self-contained world, failure becomes intimate, isolation is the norm, and fear is the way life is. And this is where the hypocrisy becomes inescapable. I long for community. I admire collective living. I write about its beauty. But I organize my life in ways that make me slowly slip away from it. I move cities to be more productive. I save time, I improve my routines, and I keep my solitude safe. I hide myself and call it focus. I live like an individualist, yet, I critique individualism. That contradiction isn’t coincidental, it is learned. This way of life trains you to want belonging while directing your life to prevent belonging. The more independent you become, the more difficult it is to re-integrate into shared dependence.
Community demands nuisance. It requires availability, vulnerability and patience. Individualism rewards control. It brings clarity, efficiency, predictability. And once you integrate that logic into the way you think about yourself, even personal relationships can feel less like necessities and more like potential disruptions.
Here Rust Cohle’s phrase turns nihilism into something more than nihilism. He is not just rejecting meaning; he is satirizing the cosmic narcissism that contemporary existence subtly promotes. The belief that the universe is centered on your trajectory. That your suffering, your ambition, your struggle must be special and precious. When the self is so big, the sense that it is absurd as well as fragile becomes the norm. Any failure feels existential. Any pause feels dangerous. Lack of momentum, it feels like loss of identity. What the collective way of living provided — and how I felt on an immediate level — was not a loss of meaning but a redistribution of it. Meaning was no longer entirely inside of the self. It lived between people. That self-importance replaced with responsibility.
Performance gave way to belonging. The self shrank, but the life felt larger. This is not to say that the Western model is wrong. Individualism fuels innovation, social mobility and extraordinary discipline. It’s what enables people to reinvent themselves, escape static systems, build things that would not be feasible in an unbending collectivism. I am a beneficiary of that system. It is what gives me my opportunities, my career, independence. But any system extracts a cost. The price is more under the radar: constant self-surveillance, moral isolation and pervasive low-grade anxiety, and the idea you are alone at the center of everything.
When worth has to be consistently justified, rest loses its value. If life is a solo project, community doesn’t seem like a requirement. By making meaning individualized, isolation becomes the norm. And I am not claiming to have resolved this tension. I still live it. When I feel the urge to belong, I choose solitude. However I still over-optimize when I am ready to rest. I still believe in community, even if I do not act like I trust it 100 percent. But clarity may itself be a beginning. Perhaps the remedy is not to renounce individuality or romanticize collectivism, but to understand how quickly the self becomes the gravitational center on everything, regardless of whether it should even be.
Shrinking the self does not erase meaning. It often allows it. And probably the most dangerous illusion that Rust was mocking is not that we believe that we are important, but that we believe that we must bear the weight of meaning all by ourselves.