1 post tagged “selfishness”
Standing in the queue to the checkout at Pathmark, New York's equivalent of Tesco's, I was forced to contemplate celebrities, due to the large quantity of pulpy magazines on display next to the conveyor belt. These are of course meant to entice shoppers into a last-minute impulse buy to satisfy their lust for gossip.
Men's Health was there and the front cover promised foolproof advice on losing weight and gaining muscle. How a magazine can survive by re-working the same articles every month for decades is baffling. And if their advice really helped and made all their readers look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the magazine would become unnecessary and go out of business. Or they'd have to write some new articles I suppose. But I don't think that there's much danger of that happening any time soon.
Prince William's split with his girlfriend was also big news on the pap shelf. The thing that struck me about this (and I only saw the headline and a picture of them so please bear in mind that I know nothing about it at all) was that she isn't really all that attractive. Call me shallow, but if I were Prince William and had a choice of absolutely any single woman in the entire world, I would choose a corker. Yes, of course she'd need a good personality. There are plenty of beautiful women with great personalities in the world, my own angelic girlfriend being a good example (I have to say this because she reads my blog :-) but it is also my opinion).
This led me to wonder (for some inexplicable reason because it doesn't really follow on logically) what would have happened if Camilla Parker Bowles had been stunningly beautiful. Would the public have been far more favourably disposed to her? I suspect so. I'm not the only shallow one, see.
This also led me to consider what a terrible Prince and King I would make. My uncle Peter, a staunch royalist, believes that with the privileges of monarchy comes duty. If born to be king, you have a choice between accepting a life dedicated to working hard to serve your country, as the Queen and Prince Charles currently do as far as I can tell (my uncle assures that me they do), or abdicating. I see his point and I certainly agree that it would make for a good king. But I can't imagine myself either working really hard all my life or abdicating so, quite apart from all my other poor qualities, I'd be a bad king due to this.
My own approach to life has been characterised by getting as much out of it while putting as little as possible into it. I'm not proud of this, but neither am I particularly ashamed. At school and the first two years of university, I made a conscious decision to, in general, do as little work as I could get away with. During the last year at university and while studying for my accounting qualification I worked my butt off, but only because I knew that the rewards in the long run would far outweigh the pain. Then during my working life I worked very hard during the day but tried to arrange my circumstances so that I wouldn't have to work long hours, and worked in investment banking where the money was better than elsewhere. I offered a strong skill set that was in short supply, and dedication during normal working hours, in return for a protection from long hours. In general I was lucky enough to have colleagues and bosses who supported me in this. Now I hope to live in a country with low taxes as I see no benefit in paying any more tax than I absolutely have to and if another country offers a better deal than Britain I see no reason to decline it.
This approach to life is what economists call rational self interest. From what I understand, classical economic models are based on the assumption that everyone behaves this way and suggest that it will lead to an optimal allocation of economic resources and a better quality of life for all. So this goes some way to making me feel better about my selfishness. If everyone behaved like me, the world would in theory be a nice place to live and classical economic models would bear a strong relationship to the real world. But not everyone does and I don't think they do. My older sister and father are examples of people who appear happy to give far more than they take and I suspect that the world is an even better place still because of them. I would also put the Queen, Prince Charles and probably Prince William in this category too. I raise my hat to them all.
