Self-Interest

What would the world come to if people did not strive to help themselves? Would more be accomplished or nothing at all? When is helping oneself self-interest, and when is it rude and selfish? How far does one have to go to not be selfish? In order to be not selfish, must a person spent all their time giving to others? Is in a way giving to others even show selfishness? If that is true is it possible to end selfishness? These questions do not have straight answers, and probably never will. Yet, to understand the importance of self-interest it is important to understand my opinion of the answers to these questions.

Self-interest is when people strive to help their condition, or themselves without implicating harm on others. It causes people to work harder. I am sure without self-interest many people would not be working at all. Why would they work, if they were not interested in helping themselves? Why would the secretary file papers for hours without getting something out of it? This is very important because without self-interest there would not be a work force. Even high school students strive harder out of self-interest. Those who work harder attend better colleges, and are expected to lead a prospering life. If those students did not feel the need to get into a good college, and lead a life that would be helpful to them, then they would never get anywhere. It is often now that other generations insult the youth of today as being lazy and ignorant. I do not feel that my generation is lazy and ignorant, yet without self-interest pushing them to work I think they would become lazy and ignorant.

Selfishness, although related to self-interest, has important differences. A major difference between selfishness and self-interest is that selfishness while helping oneself may also hurt others. A person becomes rude and selfish when they do not pay attention to anyone but themselves. Selfishness is best shown when a person has responsibilities such as children and family to take care of. Yet, ignores those responsibilities and only focuses on themselves. Selfishness is shown when others are willing to ruin relationship through fights of money. This can easily be seen when the young athlete is suing their parents for stealing their money. This can also be seen on any of the court television shows where p...

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...all the exterminators in the world decided one day they did not care if they made money and quit because they did not have self-interest this would cause many problems for those whom still cared about themselves and their daily life style.

The last example I will give about selfishness and self-interest is how much business strikes hurt people. For example recently many people have seen information that there was a possibility of a subway strike. This would be an act of selfishness because it would harm many people by making traffic into the city horrendous. The matter was settled and they did not strike which was good for many people who worked in a city. If the matter were not settled it would cause many hardships to innocent people. While the subway workers were just trying to get their self-interests fulfilled.

I do not feel that self-interest is something that anyone can, or should stop. It is something that is absolutely necessary. There is no reason that people should not fulfill their self-interests as long as they are not hurting others while doing this. That is the small yet important line between selfishness and self-interest that should never be broken.

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