Obligations and self-interest

I will start this one with an example out of my daily life and then look for the general behavior that is behind it.

Today I had some visitors in my appartment that I share with two friends of mine. You know what happens when people live together. Well, they tend to accumulate some stuff. Also, cleaning is a bit disregarded sometimes. Even though we have made some very clear rules about it, the execution of those rules is another matter. I already mentioned that we had some visitors coming. To give them a good impression about our apartment, we brushed and cleaned up our apartment nicely. I admit that it felt good to get to action, even though I am very fond of those cleaning tasks. It felt good because it provided some kind of a fresh start.

This takes me to the second part of this post. I felt somehow obliged to host my guests in a nice environment. In that view, our action to clean was externally driven. But at the same time, it felt good personally to take action. In that view, our action to clean was internally driven.

Now I wonder what trigger is the strongest in general. Is it the obligation we feel towards other people or is the self-interest we are seeking for. In my opinion the external trigger (obligations) is a very strong trigger for putting us into action. However, in the longer run we are looking for self-interest: we want to feel good about the thing we do. We want to give them some kind of perspective: will I benefit in the longer run?

To sum up, I believe that our environment is the strongest trigger for starting our actions. But in the longer run we want do do things that are in line with our goals and aspirations. In that view we are driven by self-interest.

Tagged as: external, internal, obligations, self-interest, trigger