I see ‘being selfish’ as a way to describe the motivation behind a person’s behaviour. And I believe that we are all selfish creatures. I am selfish, YOU are selfish, everyone is selfish…

.. how did that last statement make you feel? Bouncing around inside with joy? Probably not. But I think there has been a terrible misuse of this word over the course of history which has led it to be what it means to us today.

Let’s dive into some examples to explain why being selfish may not be such a bad thing after all:

Imagine that for some creative and highly unlikely reason there is a group of people who are about to take their last living breath in this world. You have been gifted (or cursed, depending on your outlook) with the ability of saving just a few of these people. Maybe you have a handful of antidote capsules, or a time machine, or a  ZOLL 1200B Defibrillator with limited power… whatever floats your boat .. it’s your imagination here. Also, for the sake of this example, and to further demonstrate my point, let’s throw in a few people that you care about into this group. You can’t save all of them, just a few; What would determine which of these innocent victims you would save, and which you would let die in front of you like the awful awful person that you are?

• If you saved the people you cared about the most; that’s being selfish.
• If you saved those who you thought would better serve the human race; that’s still your idea of what that means.
• If it was the people who you didn’t care about; perhaps you’d be concerned that your legacy would be that you were a ‘selfish’ person, and you didn’t want to be seen as that kind of person.
• If you saved those in Alphabetical order; perhaps you’d be so concerned with being ‘unselfish’ that you were trying to selfishly do something unselfish.

OK… so it’s an extreme example.. but what I’m trying to get at, is that no matter how hard we try to separate our choices from our sense of self, we still make those choices which are related to what we care about.

I did a quick hunt to try and find some gems of what could be considered truly unselfish people, and dug up the following opinions: Oprah, Mother Theresa and ‘Soldiers’. Not exactly what I’d call Treasure, but it’s a start.

In each of the cases above, I would imagine that they all get a certain sense of self satisfaction for doing the ‘good deeds’ that they are seen to do. So they could still be considered Selfish people.

But something doesn’t feel quite right about it. If I call my neighbour selfish for taking up two car parking spaces instead of one, how do we differentiate between their negative selfish actions and these more positive selfish actions that are performed by people we admire? I propose the following; Let’s keep the existing word for Selfish as the one which means “concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself”, and create a new one that conveys the idea that it may be impossible to separate the choices we make in life from our own sense of identity. You may have your own idea of what this would could be, but for the moment, I call it “Selfy”.