2024-02-29 09:26:02
There is quite a big age difference between me and my younger brother. There is a whopping 8 years difference in age. There are several reasons why there is such a large age gap. First of all, my parents didn’t want to have any more children following giving birth to me. So I grew up as an only child until I was a certain age. But as I grew up, I continued to envy my friends who had younger siblings. In particular, when I went to my close friend’s house, she was always playing Legos or games with her younger brother, and I was jealous of that, so I kept begging my parents to have a younger sibling. Even on the first full moon of the year, when my parents told me to make a wish while looking at the moon, I closed my eyes, put my hands together, and made a wish to have a younger sibling.
In the end, my parents saw me like that and decided to have a second child. Although I wanted it so desperately, my mother later said that she was worried that I was a very selfish child, perhaps because I grew up as an only child. Anyway, so I decided to have a second child, even though it was late, and thanks to that, I got a much younger sibling.
Hey~ Brother~ (Isn’t this it?)
But now, 30 years later, the only children I have met over the past 30 years have rarely been as selfish as my mother said. Of course, there were the occasional selfish person, but in my experience, there did not seem to be a significant difference in the ratio between only children and non-only children. On the contrary, half of the people who were so kind and selfless that I thought I should emulate them were only children. So I thought, ‘Isn’t there something to do with being an only child and being selfish?’ and I looked to see if that thought was true. In fact, several researchers carefully tested whether this hypothesis was correct through various experiments, and at the end of the study, we found articles that said, ‘There is no correlation between being an only child and being selfish.’ Then, ‘Then why was I selfish when I was young?’ I had a question.
I once said in another article that the difference between children who eat marshmallows right in front of them and children who endure for a bigger reward was the family’s income level. Children who might buy marshmallows at any time were able to resist eating them, but children who grew up in families with low incomes and no guarantee of future food might not resist eating them right away.
I think that a certain degree of selfishness like this is something that grows in an environment where there is not enough leisure. If I were in an environment where I might eat as many snacks as I wanted whenever I wanted, I wouldn’t hesitate to give my snacks to people, but on the other hand, if I was in an environment where I didn’t know when I would be able to eat these snacks once more, it would be very difficult to give them to others.
If you think regarding it that way, I think the fact that my environment wasn’t very good when I was young had some influence on me. When I think back to my childhood, even at that young age, I was aware that my family’s circumstances were not good. Maybe that’s why, when I went to my friends’ houses, I was always envious of their toys, and I was also very envious of their houses and their environment (my father worked and my mother took care of the house).
They had lots of toys, but toys were not easy to come by, so when I did get the chance to buy toys, I had to pick and choose very carefully. As a result, I remember getting angry whenever someone touched the toy I bought following such a long period of thinking.
Considering that, I think the reason people ultimately become selfish is probably because they don’t have enough time. First of all, following taking full care of myself, I need to have some energy left over to be able to take care of others.
Sometimes I hear things like that. They say leisure comes from your wallet. When I was young, I thought that was a very snobbish thing that praised people with money. But these days, contrary to when I was young, I agree with that statement to a certain extent. You can’t be an altruistic person who takes good care of others just because you have money, but I’ve often seen people who are financially well off are also psychologically comfortable, and that’s why they take care of the people around them. When I was young, I was taught that a person’s character is unchanging and not influenced by the environment, and that is why I was taught to always use my mind kindly, but in reality, a person’s character is also easily influenced by the environment.
But on the other hand, I often imagine a time when I have a lot of money, and when I see that I am not particularly altruistic in that imagination, I think that once my personality has hardened, it may not be easy to change even if the environment changes.
Right now, I have no idea which one is correct, so I want to make a lot of money to confirm that.
What I look like when I have that much free time
Isn’t this my true original self?
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#Episode #prejudice #children #selfish
