Aren't we losing much because of being selfish?

    When I was in school, I think the competition that I saw around me was not as much as what I see around me now. I had lessons of sharing through experiences and not through some moral science classes. It was perfect, if I look back.

    But things changed too fast. When I moved past high school, entered college for Under Graduation, then for work and now MBA, the competition I see around has nothing healthy in it. I don’t deny that we indeed require healthy competition.  But I see only pure selfishness. A senior never takes an advice from a junior even if the latter is entirely correct, because it hurts the former’s ego if he/she admits that he/she is indeed ready to dilute his stand and also junior is more correct. The result. Everyone loses. The junior may lose confidence in himself/herself. Also the rest of the group or team or any affected parties lose.

    Then there are opinions. Yes, everyone has an opinion. But, I never see how many people think deep about it. If I take a stand and if I realize that I was wrong, I should be able to admit that I was indeed wrong and change my stand and take a position, which may add value and indeed carry on the discussion, not necessarily blindly joining the other side. Most of the times, there are only half baked opinions as people tend to pick out stuff that helps their own stand and they ignore others. But this reduces involvement in any discussion because no one knows what the other person says and why he/she says that. The result. We are just at the opposite ends and lose out much on the results that could have helped every party involved in the discussion to involve themselves in working towards a common result. What usually happen at the end will be just the “might is right”. Office discussions, Group projects, Panel discussions, political discussions; everything just fails to produce positive results through proper discussions. Usually an important or mighty one’s opinion becomes the final word.

    In Indian context, the traffic on our roads in cities show how selfish we are. The way in which we drive, the way in which we rush through peak traffic caring for no one else, the way in which we ignore traffic rules, all add up over the woes of congestion and poor infrastructure. We collectively lose. TRo quantify, the wastage of fuel on Indian Roads amount to billions every year and our cities have the highest number of respiratory diseases.

    Again there are many manifestations of selfishness such as emotional blackmailing, creating information asymmetry, creating tensions among communities and one can go on and on and on. Yesterday I went to meet some friends at the place where they stay. One guy asked another to switch off a light in the kitchen since the latter was standing near to the switch. The reply was, “I won’t switch off anything which I didn’t switch on”. May be, we require some healthy self-criticism as a prerequisite to become selfless and unselfish beings.