Selfishness

So, in my last post I asked, prompted by an orgy, of all things, if perhaps I am a selfish man. It is a fair question. One that we must all ask ourselves often enough that we don’t allow ourselves to fall into bad behaviors.

What do I mean by selfish?

I mean that I think of me, and essentially only me, in my dealings with other people. Sexually, politically, personally.

The answer is a resounding yes, and no.

First, the yes.

I am selfish because I have to admit to myself that in most dealings, I tend to consider how something affects me before I ever consider how it might affect other people. It isn’t that I never consider others, but that I always come first.

But the no surprised me, because I also tend to blame myself for a great many things that, as I put some thought to it, were not really my fault. I blamed myself for my dealings with certain people in my life and called myself selfish in the process, but as I gave this all thought, and Aphrodite helped me figure this out, it turns out I was reacting to the things others do to me.

The people I associate with are selfish. In fact, they are tremendously self centered, and it has caused me to react in ways that have been detrimental to me. An example of this is the fact that they only turn to me to do things THEY want to do, while my requests to do things that I want to do go rejected. So as a reaction I have essentially made myself as self centered as they are, and I generally now reject things if I am not personally interested in them myself.

In other words, I have a lot of ass hole friends to whom I am just companionship when all else fails them.

But, my own selfishness in this is in both blaming myself for their behavior and in reacting to it in a selfish manner. If their behavior bothers me, I should remove them from my life, not act as an ass hole in return.

Instead, I have made the arrogant move of selfishly planning things to make myself feel good and including them only as an afterthought, and so, do they now react in return? Of course they do.

Anyway, I have to explore this selfishness further as I think about it in situations of emotion, love, sex, etc.