At the beginning, it is very difficult to change the way of life from living for us to living for others. When living for others has become a natural habit, we will discover that happiness is here.

ALTRUISM

Another measure of morality is our tendency to live either for ourselves or for others. If we live for ourselves too much, we are morally deficient. If we live for others, we are more moral.
However, selfishness is a natural instinct of all beings. Everyone just wants to benefit themselves first. For example, we tend to take care of ourselves first before thinking about others. If we let things go on without education, the selfish instinct will drive our thoughts and deeds into an immoral way of living.

Only with education - the awakening of wisdom - can we go against the selfish traits to live altruistically.
Here are some examples where people choose to live for others instead of themselves. A father pretended to leisurely enjoy his drink and chatted with others to wait for his children to eat until they were full, then he would eat what was left. The money we had saved for a new bike was then given to a neighbor who just got into a bad accident. Work hours were over and the front desk worker could go enjoy a party, but an old man had been waiting too long for his paperwork to be processed.

So, he stayed behind longer to help the old man. After taking a bite, we saw a skinny dog staring hungrily at our loaf of bread, so we gave him all of it. We met a person three days in a row and saw that he was wearing the same shirt again, so we gave him a new shirt we just bought. The final math exam was coming, but our friend was struggling, so we spent a month tutoring him.

At the beginning, it is very difficult to change the way of life from living for us to living for others. When living for others has become a natural habit, we will discover that happiness is here. Living for ourselves gives us mediocre pleasures. An altruistic life, on the other hand, will bring us noble happiness. We honor someone as a saint because he lived an extremely altruistic life. In religions, when people canonize someone, they rely on how altruistic that person was while he/she was living.

Since we were born, we had the right to enjoy privileges and pleasures. But if we are moral, we will prefer serving to enjoying, working to consuming.

However, drastic denial of all enjoyment is also a negative extreme. We cannot work if we do not eat enough food. We cannot give others money if we do not have money.

So, if we take care of ourselves in order to live for others, we are still moral people. If we live for ourselves and nothing more, we are immoral. A father has to eat enough before plowing the rice field. A businessman has to save every penny to keep the business running so that the employees would still have their jobs.

A government has to strictly control tax spending to provide a lot of services in the country. Country leaders have to use armoured cars to protect their lives to lead the nation. A captain has to ignore the exhausted co-pilot to fly the plane and land safely.

They seem to act for their own interests, but it is actually for the sake of others. They are moral indeed.
If we want to build such noble altruistic tendencies, we have to look up to the altruistic saints first. We also need to tell ourselves and other people to live altruistically, too. We should not criticize selfish people, instead, we should try to advise them.

Janna