Are We Selfish?

Being out of college made reality hit hard. While I was in High School and even in college I was always around people, always with “friends,” but when that stage of my life ended, everything was different.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have people around me that support me and share the love they’ve giving me since we met. However, my social circle has decreased A LOT, and more important, there're people that are still next to me but not with the same intentions, not with the same support and not with the same love. And because of who I am and because of how I treat people in my life; that makes me feel disappointed in humanity.

I’m the kind of person who loves to be around people with more knowledge, with more experience; people from which I can learn and I can feel challenged to become better, you know what I meant? Ever since I can remember, I was that annoying kid hanging out with the adults. I always thought that kids with my age were stupid and it wasn’t that felt that I was better, but I didn’t want to be stupid anymore... I don’t want to be stupid anymore.

And at the same time, every time I learn something I want to share, and every time I know I have something that could help others I’ll give it to them. I didn’t mind until I realized how much people interpreted my “willingness to help.” I started to hear people telling me “you need to be more jealous of your time,” “you need to stop doing favors” or “it’s been a few months since you haven't done me a favor, that’s weird.”

So, thinking about this and about how people change while growing up, I wanted to know if it was just me being too kind (if that’s even a thing). And I found different sides of my theory.

This first thing that surprised me during my research about the selfishness of humanity was that according to a study made by The Common Cause Foundation, “A large majority of the 1,000 people they surveyed – 74% – identifies more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness, and justice than in money, fame, status and power. On the other side, a similar majority – 78% – believe others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.”

So we think that others are selfish, but in reality, we are not. The human race tends to help, especially if we see the necessity in others, no matter if rewarded or not (as studies showed years before). In an experiment made by Dr Warneken and colleague Professor Michael Tomasello, to develop if toddlers without social skills were able to help others, they determinate that as humans we’re more willing to help others, “When the scientists accidentally dropped a spoon inside and pretended they did not know about the flap, the children helped retrieve it. They only did this if they believed the spoon had not been dropped deliberately.”

The result is that, we all think people are selfish and that’s why my friends are telling me to stop being so cooperative because they think nobody is going to appreciate my eagerness to support, but the reality is that I don’t need to change, I don’t need to stop being helpful, all I need to do is actually avoid thinking that I’m the only one that is kind, and understands that we’re not wrong about ourselves, we’re wrong about others.