I really loved this passage from Jonathan Safran Foer’s commencement address:

“Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life,
but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost
impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get
in exchange for having to die.”

Or, as E. M. Forster put it even more concisely, “Only connect!”