> I find it difficult to accept that this kind of effect is entirely selfish and is based entirely in self-satisfaction. I can't see it as anything but fundame

> I find it difficult to accept that this kind of effect is entirely selfish and is based entirely in self-satisfaction. I can't see it as anything but fundamentally egocentric, I'm afraid. What is wanting something of yourself to persist after you die except for a fundamentally self-serving goal? It speaks of a desire to have people remember you (hopefully even commend you) for what is basically the eternity after you live. > It's "reductive" in a sense that it reduces a complex, interconnected system of personality to a basic matter of whether we feel good about something. I agree that being reductive isn't always the best approach. But it does have it's place - with so many people doing what is essentially virtue signaling it can be valuable to remember what the primary driver for behavior like that is. Perhaps it really isn't like that for you, and that's great. If the goal is not to convince me that that is the case, then why talk about it at all? Is it just so I can remember that this is also a thing that people say? Your point on psychotherapy seems to be to be a bit of a tangent. To wit, most of the time the problems and the way you solve them are indeed fairly simple. It's just a matter of picking one of the choices you already know you have and sticking with it. Making choices can be difficult, but not because following through on them is necessarily very complicated. I am purposely excluding big outliers from this, because that's where it might actually be complex (and also because I don't know enough about them to really say anything useful).