Selfishness

Hello again, blogfans!

As it says in my little thumbnail, I consider myself a student of human nature. I have a little "law" that I share with students every year while we're going through the topic of energy. I call it "Armstrong's Law." It goes like this:

Everything in nature, including students, will travel the path of least resistance to the lowest state of potential energy

In other words, people always find the easiest way to get something accomplished.

This is why people are basically selfish most of the time. It takes less energy to hoard things and keep them from people, even people they know to be trustworthy, than it does to share and make others happy. I can't stand selfish people!!!

Now, this is not without caveat. I've loaned things to people I thought I could trust, only to have problems. Either the thing I loaned was abused, or it was kept for an inordinate period of time, or it never came back at all. Those people got a resounding "no!" next time they asked to borrow something of mine. You know, the old "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!" thing. However, I at least gave them the opportunity to prove themselves trustworthy.

Material things aren't the only things we can be selfish with, though. We can be selfish with our time and our talent just as easily. When you know it's going to disappoint someone to NOT show up at a family function, for example, but you do it anyway just because of some flimsy excuse or because someone else's priorities are more important to you, that's a form of selfishness as well.

Well, what goes around comes around, as the saying goes. Those who show selfish qualities don't like it much when the tables are turned and something THEY want is suddenly unavailable.

We all have to grow up some day, I guess.