Selfishness: What is good and what is bad?

Selfishness is a model of behavior, sharpened exclusively for the satisfaction of personal needs. A person who thinks exclusively about his needs, desires and aspirations and behaves accordingly is traditionally considered an egoist. This behavior and attitude towards people is the essence of selfishness.

The height of selfishness is when a person solves his problems at the expense of others, giving nothing in return for money, attention, help and personal participation, if required. Simply put, he tries to use others in his own interests, and is very offended if others begin to see his dependent habits and ignore his attempts to sit on his neck.

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Such ugly forms of selfishness harm, first of all, the person himself, because such an attitude towards people will very soon leave him without resources to achieve his own goals. Simply because people get tired of helping free of charge, and many tasks are difficult to solve alone, and sometimes even impossible.

However, not all egoists suffer from such forms of egoism. Many are so selfish that they are ready to help others, because it is profitable, and then you can count on the help and support of those whom you helped yourself. Can such behavior, in principle, be considered selfishness? And how, in this case, can be distinguished from the usual mutual assistance?

This is where the term "reasonable egoism" comes to the rescue. Reasonable selfishness means the ability to realize one's own interests without hurting the interests of others. Now we will not delve into the mathematical probability of realizing the interests of everyone without affecting the interests of anyone. Let's just not forget that the planet's resources are limited, and human greed ... oh, sorry, the desire for a better life is limited only to education. So what is intelligent selfishness?

Many articles have been written on the topic of how to deal with selfishness and how to live with it. As in the previous paragraph, we will divide the struggle with our egoism and the struggle with the selfishness of others, since the methods will be different. Let's start with how to defeat your own selfishness, which has begun to cause problems. We are realists and understand that until the egoist starts having problems, he will not bother to change something in his behavior.

In short, there are two paths for fighters against selfishness. The first way is to take the side of reasonable egoism and consciously control your behavior so that it does not look very defiantly selfish.

The second way is to develop, in opposition to selfish inclinations, other qualities, such as a willingness to help, empathize, and enjoy the success of others. If we are talking about your own egoism, which has begun to interfere with you, try, “to pause egoism” and do something good for others . The bad thing is not that you want to do something good for yourself. It’s bad when you don’t want to do something good for others.

There are a lot of options here : volunteer at an animal shelter, donate books to the library, take part in a charity concert if you are a musician, or just offer help with the housework of a lonely elderly neighbor or feed homeless animals. The roots of unhealthy forms of selfishness can lie in such depths of the subconscious that you will never get to.

An egoist may latently think that by helping someone out with money, he risks becoming a beggar, and by sharing food, he will start starving himself. Therefore, requests for help to such a person seem deliberately suspicious and dangerous. Simple actions - feeding stray animals, donating books - will show your subconscious mind that giving is not at all scary. And this can be the first step towards getting rid of painful forms of selfishness.

If you are a family person, you may wonder what exactly your other half is interested in at the moment and what kind of help or assistance she needs most. This is a fundamental moment that is most difficult for egoists who have embarked on the path of correction due to their egoistic mindset.

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Many strive to act in a formulaic way: for example, invite their wife to a restaurant or donate a set of underwear. It often turns out that the best gift for a wife would be two hours of an afternoon nap or half a day of free time to go to a beauty salon, if the husband agreed to go for a walk with a small child and fed him an afternoon snack himself. This approach will just become the door to that very reasonable egoism, which will benefit both you and those around you, and again you, because a rested and calm wife is always better than a nervous and tired one.

And, be that as it may, do not worry that you are a little more selfish than the norms imposed by society allow. People who do not know how to love themselves and take care of themselves are more likely to suffer from neuroses and other concomitant diseases and are more likely to think that they have received less from this life. In your case, you can always say that you did everything you could for yourself.

It seems that everything is more or less clear with the theme of one's own egoism. But what to do when a person from your inner circle turned out to be an egoist, and you missed this moment and now have to endure this inconvenience?

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