Selfishness is not bad

I feel that most if not all of us have experienced selfishness in one form or another in their life.

The definition goes as follows - Selfishness is being concerned excessively or exclusively for oneself or one's own advantage, pleasure, or welfare, regardless of others.

And to tell you the truth, all of the latest studies have shown that selfishness is something that every single one of us has inside. It is only a matter of how hard you can control it that defines if you are selfish or not.

It might seem insane to feel that most of us can be selfish, but since ancient times, since when we have the survivorship instinct, we have had the primate instincts to be selfish.

In the situations where we are trying to survive, it doesn’t really matter how hard you try to be nice to people. Your instincts will dominate anything else and force you into the state where the only thing that matters is surviving.

Selfishness

But let’s forget about surviving and just focus on living our everyday life.

I feel that even here, there are people that are incredibly selfish.

In my mind, the way people are separated goes as follows - each and every single one of us chooses the degree of selfishness that they carry with them.

It can range from 0 to 100 and depends on whenever the person feels like.

That number is never 0 and extremely rarely in the 100s, but it still ranges.

When people say that a person is selfish, he is most likely above 50 and cares more about himself than others.

The most fascinating thing is that most of the people are in that situation.

People do behave selfishly. That is why there are things such as carrier and personal results. If you don’t care about yourself and you don’t focus on yourself, no one else will. That inherently builds up your selfishness, but at the same time, propels you further in life.

I have been spending some time with people that can be considered athletes, and no matter how many I meet, and no matter how nice they are, my initial impression of them is that they are selfish. Why would you ask? Because you can feel an overbearing pressure from the way, they do things and behave. It feels like their every action is selfish.

Selfish is not bad

And don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t make an athlete a bad person.

I feel that selfishness has been associated with something bad, something that is so incredibly negative that people should run away and ignore people such as that. I beg to differ.

In my eyes, not only selfishness is not a bad trait, it is something that is incredibly valuable in life and in some friendships.

Depending on what you seek in a friend, you should always think of whenever the friends are pulling you up in life or bringing you down. Those are the basic parameters that I always look at.

This can be in mental awareness where a friend either supports you and lets you be more open and relaxed or a friend that makes you feel uncomfortable and anxious.

Or this can be in physical and material accomplishments where hanging out with a friend lets you get inspired, motivated and get insights that you have never even thought of before. Or there are people that are lazy and constantly complain, bringing down your mood and any motivation to move further in life.

That is why selfishness promotes success in both areas that make them incredible friends.

And as a cherry on top, especially for me, is that when you talk to selfish people, you are able to understand insights that I would otherwise never get.

I consider myself to be at around 40-45 of selfishness, and I have been slowly moving up, trying to get to that 50 threshold in order to improve my life and to be more self-aware. That is why when I talk to selfish people, I try to understand why and for what reason they do things that way in order to learn and improve.

The last thing that I want to say is that selfishness doesn’t mean that you do thing regardless of others. Selfishness is being self-aware and knowing self-worth while still understanding and treating others equally and well.

Klim Y