Gandhi isn't simply saying that helping others makes you feel better about yourself—that's the comfortable reading. Rather, he's suggesting something harder: that the self you think you're looking for might be a fiction, a collection of anxieties and small ego-grievances that dissolves the moment you stop thinking about yourself. A nurse working a sixteen-hour shift in an overwhelmed hospital ward doesn't suddenly discover her purpose through introspection; she finds it in the texture of actual need, in the way a patient's gratitude or suffering becomes more real than her own doubts. The paradox is that what we call "finding yourself" requires an amnesia about the self—a forgetting so complete that you wake up one day and realize the person you've become hardly crossed your mind.