I Got Mine
As the Australian Election Day approached in 2025, you could see a troubling cultural shift: the rise of the "I got mine" ideology, where individualism has overtaken community values and empathy. This mindset, accelerated by COVID-19 isolation, has eroded social norms, fractured our collective identity, and threatens the ideals of a democratic society – presenting us with a critical choice between continuing down this path of atomised self-interest or rebuilding our sense of shared purpose and responsibility.
We survived the 2025 Elections here in Australia and decided to vote in our incumbent Labor government for another term. What surprised everyone was the massive swing towards the government, turning around a trend that only a couple of months ago had them in a losing position. This bodes well for what I wanted to write about in this post.
The election made the rise of the "I got mine" ideology in Australia clear throughout its course. This phenomenon extends beyond our borders and is visible in countries like the US, and I see it as a direct consequence of the post-COVID-19 world, stemming from the physical isolation we all experienced during the pandemic.
During lockdowns, we retreated into our smallest social units — literally whoever we were living with at that time. Families, reconfigured households, or sometimes in complete isolation. This prolonged separation rewired our social behaviours in profound ways. One manifestation is the culture wars, where opinions and feelings compete with facts, both of which are now treated as carrying equal weight.
The more damaging outcome has been an eruption of selfishness. We've lost our sense of community and group identity. It seems only minority groups – like LGBTQI+ communities and people of colour – have managed to maintain any real semblance of collective culture and community throughout this period. [1]
Even communities built on deep, extended family relationships have been transformed by their inability to gather and connect during COVID. The result is a hardened individualism that trumps collective well-being.
This "I Got Mine" attitude now defines our cultural norms. Basic concepts of community, politeness, and social etiquette have essentially vanished. Behaviours that would have been unacceptable five years ago are now commonplace and unchallenged.
I've generally avoided confronting this shift, letting things slide to maintain some semblance of civility. However, what was once coded or subtle wrongdoing has become overt – akin to an open sewer running through our society. As long as the filth isn't directly in your home, there's a tacit acceptance that it's fine to flow freely through our public spaces.
The alternative is to build proper infrastructure – both literal and metaphorical. We need to acknowledge that conflict and disagreement will occur, but we can channel them constructively through social norms, etiquette, and mutual respect. These aren't superficial niceties but essential tools that allow us to coexist without constant confrontation with society's worst elements.
Reflecting on what constitutes civilisation, I realised that society began to flourish when we secured our basic needs sustainably. When we weren't constantly struggling for survival, we developed language, art, and communal structures. Civilisation scaled up as we found ways to support larger groups in meeting their collective needs.
But we're now regressing from that civilisational model. The fundamental concept of being "civilised" – living respectfully together and engaging in good-faith dialogue – has deteriorated. Conversations have become combative rather than collaborative. We engage in dualities of monologue rather than dialogue. The primacy of "my lived experience" now trumps facts, collective understanding, and even specialised expertise.
This "I Got Mine" ideology fundamentally undermines democracy and society because it rejects the notion that we're part of something larger than ourselves. It atomises everything into isolated individual perspectives, promoting the dangerous illusion that our beliefs and actions have no consequences for others.
Consider our response to climate change: we purchase petrol-guzzling vehicles while claiming to care about environmental preservation. We want pristine nature for our recreation but refuse to make personal sacrifices to preserve it. This hypocrisy epitomises the "I got mine" mentality.
This mindset has thoroughly infiltrated our politics, which should fundamentally be about collective action and shared values. Instead, political discourse now revolves almost exclusively around individual benefits – tax cuts and personal advantage rather than collective welfare and social safety nets.
We see almost no meaningful discussion about building future infrastructure or addressing systemic challenges, such as climate change and Indigenous health outcomes. The proper role of government should be creating systems and structures for tomorrow's society, but we can't even begin those conversations because our atomised worldview prevents thinking collectively. Our political discourse actively avoids these essential topics.
Here's my proposition: we can create something better even if it doesn't currently exist. Politics today lacks imagination – people assume there's a fixed game with established rules that can't be changed.
While figures like Trump demonstrate how to disrupt existing systems, we need disruption that unifies rather than divides. Politics should function as a contest of ideas, visions, and futures focused on systemic change rather than individual benefit. We need to shift from measuring success through individualised polling to evaluating collective progress and shared outcomes. The reality of democracy is that it is a popularity contest! The ideas with the most appeal win.
We've lost our sense of "we", what we should collectively prioritise, and how we should approach challenges together. My vision for future politics is to elevate discourse to the societal level, with each level of government addressing appropriate scopes of community needs. Federal politics should focus on national issues and broad collective action, rather than micromanaging individual concerns that are better suited to local governance.
I've long been disillusioned with politics, but I'm beginning to recognise that I dislike what it has become, not what it could be. In saying that, I may need to engage more deeply – not just to better understand the system but to actively work toward transforming it into something that serves our collective future.
There is a link, of course, to the exclusionary measures imposed on generations of minorities and the decay we see around us today. The terrible desire to "other" has grown to become so toxic that the other is everyone but ourselves! ↩︎