The word “selfish” is defined as being concerned mainly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.
I am as selfish as you are. Maybe a little more or less actually but that is the stone-cold truth. We all crave satisfaction from what we do for ourselves and for others. This goes to say, there is no selfless good deed done. Now, before you start judging how wrong I am about this, let me throw in a couple of scenarios to prove my point.
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If you happen to be a billionaire who cannot stand the sight of poverty. I mean whenever you see people struggling for food and potable water, you get dispirited and decide to help out by making food and water readily available for these people. Now, they are happy and that makes your sadness vanish.
Another Scenario
You happen to be the head of a corporation (state-owned). You happen to be underpaid and a project worth million gets to be spearheaded by you. You decide to take a portion of the millions to satisfy your desires such buy a luxury home and car, go on vacations to exotic islands and a whole lot. You did this by dipping into money that didn’t belong to you.
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I chose these two scenarios because they are very common in almost every country today. In the first instance, you will feel good within once you have been able to help those without food and water get them. Now, what if you didn’t feel bad for those people in that situation? Would you have helped anyway? What is the probability that you would have helped if you didn’t feel bad about their situation? You did it to feel a sense of relief and that makes it about you at a certain point. It makes you selfish (at a small degree) at this point proving my point “There is no selfless good deed”.
In thee second instance, there a higher degree of selfishness being displayed. Dipping into company funds allocated to developmental projects makes you no hero when caught (which happens almost every time). Here, you deprive those who really needed that money to satisfy your desires which made you feel a sense of relief as well. This is the only type of selfishness that is frowned upon by many societies mainly because only one party benefits from it all whereas in the first instance, every one gets something out of it.
Just like everyone has a bit of craziness in them, there is also an amount of selfishness residing in us. It is sometimes frowned on as I stated earlier when we use it for just ourselves and it is also praised when we include many in it. Just remember that, it is a core part of who we are and if you ever feel like being selfish, be the good kind that everyone wants.