The Most Selfish Person... I Know

Hello! Oh blog, I've had the sorest throat all of last week, it was terrible!! You can't imagine the pain, blog, it was the worst sore throat you've ever had! And now, like, it's gone, but my voice sounds terrible and I could barely talk at all at the weekend! It sucked so bad, it felt like it stole my personality a little. Like I couldn't express myself.

And I really needed my voice this weekend! I did loads of cool stuff!

Firstly, on Friday night I had to supervise the life drawing class. There were 15 of us art society people there. I had to book the taxis and get them all to the center on time. It was a bit of a panic because someone didn't turn up and I didn't know what to do! I'm so rubbish at coping under pressure. Anyway, we had a great time. I'm not even going to post my drawings, they were terrible!

Saturday night my friends Ben and Carrie came over and Speed helped me cook a curry for them. Well, I say help... He pretty much did it all while I was busy chatting (sore, as my throat was).

Ooh! I forgot to mention that last weekend Speed and I went to see Santa at the garden center! Here's a piccy:


Today I want to talk about altruism. You know, doing something that is completely selfless. It's impossible, apparently! I've been trying to think of all sorts of complex scenarios to prove this wrong, but I fail every time...

For example, if some dude sees an old granny drop her walking stick in an empty street then he might help her pick it up because he "didn't want to let an old granny struggle." But part of the reason why he helps her is for the selfish reason of preventing his guilt. He knows that if he didn't help that granny then he'd feel terrible and he doesn't want that, so in order to help his own emotions, he helps the granny. How selfish...

Another example: an anonymous organ donor. Hard to see how this is selfish, eh? He won't get any respect from his friends, he won't get paid, he won't even know who he is helping. But he must be donating organs for a reason, right? Probably because he wants to make the world a better place. But the satisfaction he receives for making the world a better place is selfish. He'll feel really good about donating! Totally selfish...

So it's true that everything anyone does has selfish motives? I find that much too depressing. Sure, these people are satisfying their urges or instincts to help people, and they might feel better about it afterwards, but I don't think that's selfish. I think, the fact that they have these urges is purely selfless. The fact that someone "doesn't want to let an old granny struggle" or "wants to make the world a better place" is a really selfless idea. It may be true that, if they didn't have these feelings they wouldn't help people, but the fact is they do have these feelings. They can't help feeling that way. They do have a choice whether to act on the feelings, though. So what if they get some satisfaction from acting on their feelings. That's unavoidable, so it should be ignored.

Well, I suppose altruism really is impossible by definition. But who cares, it's a stupid definition. Sometimes people do really nice things, and if the only benefit they get from it is satisfying their 'itch' to do it, well, I'm sure we can let that slide :-)