Self Indulgent | Teen Ink

Self Indulgent

December 11, 2013
By Anonymous

According to Global Hunger, about 16,000 children die every day from hunger; however, knowing this statistic, people continue to go out and buy thousands of dollars worth of their wants and ignore other people’s needs. People aren’t born selfish, they choose to be selfish. Selfishness is never a characteristic people look for in another, so why choose to be selfish.

Selfishness negatively contributes to modern America being defined by self indulgensism.
According to World Hunger Problems, more than 1.3 billion people across the universe are currently living on less than one dollar today. Today, people are so selfish that it causes self indulgenism which then causes people to not realize all of the less fortunate people in the world; people that can’t afford to feed their family one meal a day, while we sit here and eat 3 meals a day, not including the snacks. Around the world, every 3.6 seconds someone dies of starvation while others engorge themselves with food.We as people have the power to fix this, by instead of making dinner for 20 when there’s actually only four people, give the home cooked meal to a local shelter. Or the second option would be to actually cook for four and donate the unused boxes of food to a food pantry drive, there’s usually one in all schools. There a numerous ways to fix the worldwide problem world hunger; however, due to self indulgence it has become impossible for the world to fully come together as one and put an end to this problem.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, over 640,000 people experience homelessness on any given night in the US. Imagine being homeless, having nowhere to go, nobody to turn to, nothing to eat or drink; however, you still here of people spending hundreds sometimes even thousands of dollars on clothes, purses, jewelry and even other things, and you wonder why can’t someone be kind enough to donate that money to people like me. We have the ability to fix homelessness, but due to too many people being selfish it feels like this problem will never be fixed. Up to 40,000,000 people around the world are currently homeless. If you think about it that would be like the entire state of California being homeless. Its not healthy for those people to be homeless and its not healthy for the people that care to stress over the amount of people in poverty and homeless. This is why we need to take action, if we, the world, come together as one there is no way that we can’t raise enough food and money for those who need it. Not only do these people need food and money but they need to know people care about them, they need love. By helping these people, they will realize that the whole world cares about them which will give them a reason to keep going with their lives. Helping others not only provides a good feeling to those in need of the help but it relieves those helping of stress. In today’s society, we all are in need of a little stress reliever, so lend a helping hand.

In today’s society there are now waiting lists for homeless shelters, the people who need a home the most are now being denied access. In America there are people who have homes worth over 10 million dollars, these are the people who can afford to help; and yes I do admit that many of the people with this kind of money do help, but many still choose not to help because of their selfishness. If people stopped purchasing something every time they wanted something and only purchased something when they needed it, we could have enough money to build homeless shelters for those in need. Even the homeless shelters that don’t have waiting lists, they are bound to be packed with people and are finding that they have no place to put these people. Some of these homes worth millions are large enough to house 20 homeless people. Instead of putting so much money into a home, people can be unselfish and donate that money to local charities. Due to natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, there are even more homeless people in need of our help. We have the power to do something to fix this, so why not act on this problem now.

In life we have to remember that, selfishness negatively contributes to modern America being defined by self indulgence. Yes I know we’re only human, I understand that in some point and time we are going to be selfish and full fill our wants more often over other peoples needs; but the satisfaction we get from buying our wants isn’t a long term satisfaction, its short term. But, helping those in need gives us a long term, life lasting feeling of satisfaction, that can’t be taken away from us, unlike our wants. Lets start the new year off with a good feeling that will spread across the world, lets help others.



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