A friend of mine had some trouble at work recently when she was late for a meeting. She was 15 minutes late for a meeting scheduled at noon and had informed her immediate supervisor 15 minutes beforehand that she had just come out of a meeting and might be a little late. She had asked him to inform the other participants of the meeting as well and requested that they start without her and that she would rush to join them.
When she finally got to office, she got lectured on punctuality by her supervisors’ boss who was miffed at her. They all had apparently waited for her. When my friend told him that she had informed her supervisor, he looked surprised and said he didn’t get the message. When she looked questioningly at her supervisor, he just looked away with a sheepish grin.
My friend was furious. She didn’t understand why her supervisor would pull such a stunt. She had always thought of him as a good man with a strong sense of self and that incident changed her views about him completely. In hindsight, she now realizes that he has always been like that: quick to pin the blame on someone else, take all the credit for good work, and trying to put others down to make himself seem better.
Her rants about her supervisor got me thinking about my own little world filled with people I didn’t like all that much. I knew many such people with similar traits myself. And I guess we all know such selfish people, even deal with them on a daily basis. This stark realization that humans are inherently selfish beings came, though not as a complete shock, as a bit of a surprise because I realized even I was, to a certain extent, selfish.
However, there is a difference between being selfish and being selfish with malicious intent. In today’s dog eat dog world, you have to think about yourself and maybe even put yourself first because nobody else will. But in doing that, there is no need to be unkind and harm others. However, some people really do seem to be wired a different way and are willing to go to any lengths if it benefits them without giving a thought to how their actions will affect others.
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Recently, at a wedding, another friend was complaining about how the function was poorly organized and how the groom’s family depended entirely on their relatives to take care of the wedding functions for them. So much so that one never saw the parents doing any hard work at all. The relatives, on the other hand, were roughing it out, at the lazy duo’s beck and call. And to make matters worse, the buffet at the reception was closed before these hard working relatives had had a chance to eat. It was too late, said the groom’s father.
A study, published in Brain and Cognition, has managed to visualize what happens in the brains of these kinds of people when others are nice to them. The study found they went into overdrive, working out how best to exploit them. These manipulative, deceitful people who lack empathy often have a very poor sense of self which is probably why they need to make others look bad to make themselves seem like the good person. They are weak and often haunted by the fear of loss of control.
I have met people who cannot think beyond themselves and expect the world to revolve according to their wishes and demands. And when it inevitably doesn’t do so, they are quick to get sad, upset, and angry. A relative is like that and there’s a perpetual scowl etched on her face by years of disappointments and unlearnt lessons.
What these kinds of people don’t realize is when they rely on anyone else more than they do on themselves, they are most likely to be disappointed.
But this is where the selfish gene kicks in. Many people, it seems, truly believe they deserve nothing but the best, that everybody else is beneath them, and that people need to be nice to them irrespective of their actions. Selfishness is a big issue these days. Many studies are being conducted on human behavior, and narcissism. But when someone you have to deal with regularly is consistently self-involved and self-centered, they can make your life miserable.
I was discussing this with a friend and he said it doesn’t bother him all that much because when he sees a selfish trait in someone, he steers clear of that person and doesn’t let it affect him. That sounds like the ideal way of dealing with the issue but I’m hardly the sensible kind. When people act selfishly, I often tend to judge them, label them as ‘bad’ people, and not only keep my distance but am unable to tolerate the sight of them.
How I wish there were a cure-all solution for selfish people. But, unfortunately, unless we wipe off the human race there’s no permanent solution to it. And here we can’t even cut off ties with all selfish people because some of them are stuck in our lives – through blood or marriage. And, like I admitted already, I can be pretty selfish too sometimes. But that’s just ‘sometimes’. The problem lies in being selfish more often than not.
But how long can you crib and complain and feel inadequate because of someone else’s unrealistic expectations and pointless blames? We can’t control people’s behavior but we can control our reactions. You have to be the bigger person in dealing with selfish people. It’s a bitter pill to swallow and it sucks, but you will definitely come out the happier person in the end. And sometimes, it might be a good idea to keep in mind that ‘greed is good’ and act accordingly. Survival of the fittest, perhaps?
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