After my birth, I was still obsessed with only one thing. Expansion! As soon as I grew enough, I could move on to bigger and better things. To this end, I believe I was still a utilitarian. At least I can say I remained consistent throughout times of trouble, when Mother Mary came to me speaking words of wisdom. (Okay, I never really saw “Mother Mary,” but adding a Beatles reference to a paper I’m writing for a teacher who’d get that can’t not buy me love.) Actually, at this point in my life, I was probably not as much a utilitarian as I was a preference utilitarian. Whereas when I was a fetus, I considered the greater good (that is, of my mother and myself), when I was a baby I really only wanted what was good for me. Peter Singer would have been proud.
Probably the next big change for me was when I really became cognizant of myself. I think I became aware of myself at around the same time I made one of the biggest philosophical changes in my life (and really the first one). Instead of doing things for myself, I now did them for my parents in a truly altruistic manner. Their attention was paramount, and nothing was too big a task to be undertaken to get them to notice me. Eventually, this turned to a more malicious behavior pattern. I now believed that I was entitled to my parent’s attention, and, much to their chagrin, I began doing anything and everything to this end. In fact, I was very aggressive in the pursuit of my goals at this time, going so far as to break things to be noticed. This was very typical of the childhood aggression described by Freud. It was at this point in my life that I received probably the biggest blow to my hunt for attention: my sister was born.
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