Being selflessly selfish

Most of us think of volunteering for active social work or helping someone. It makes us feel good. It transcends us to a different level of happiness. We become great in our own eyes. Yet why is it short lived? The answer is we are eventually human beings. Everything that we do-social work, helping someone for free etc.-won’t give us the feeling of complete happiness until of course there is something in it for us. I am sure most people would get their weapons out and start a war with me; to them I would just say-take a moment and think about it.

I don’t say that I am a saint who goes out of her way to help each and every person she meets. I do that with a few people. And before anyone draws a conclusion that I am selfless, I should mention that after the initial happiness, sometimes, I do not feel very good about it. No, I am not Satan’s ally, neither am I a hypocrite (someone’s laughing). I am a human being. And so being selfish comes naturally to me. It rests in my genes. It flows with my blood.

A person cannot enjoy someone else’s happiness if he/she is not happy himself/herself. That’s the basic human feeling. It happens to the very best of us. If you say you are not one of them, well either you live in denial or you are the happiest man/woman on the planet.

It is as simple as this. You are a student. Your friend too is a student. Together you study for a test. Your friend cannot understand a particular concept. So you, trying to be selfless, stop studying for your own test and help your friend understand the problem. Eventually both of you give the test and your friend scores more than you. Will you feel happy? Yes, you might, momentarily. But after the initial happiness, what do you feel? Regret-for helping out the friend or anger-for being stupid to give up your time for your friend? So where did all the happiness go? It didn’t go anywhere. It did not exist at all in the first place.

We think the selflessness and the happiness exists, but the fact is, it is a mask worn by us to show people how great we are. Only a truly happy and satisfied person will have his real face synonymous to this mask. And in humans, that’s a rare breed. For us, the most important thing is to our own selves. As long as we are happy and content, nothing in the world can deter us. But of course, we are never happy or satisfied. The world we live in does not let us be satisfied. Because the moment a person is satisfied with what he has, he is termed a loser with no aim in his life.

And the irony of the whole thing is all of us know this blatant truth. We know we will eventually regret helping a friend as there is nothing in it for us. But we still do it. We still go out of our way in doing as much charity/social work we can do. Because we all know it’s better to have a mask of a happy person than have nothing at all. Because at the end of the day, even though we feel low and depressed about our failure, we can somehow calm ourselves by taking the credit of someone else’s success.

And that makes us, human beings, the smartest of all creations, sad.