Survival Essay Sample: Is Survival Selfish?

📌Category: Feature of Character, Life
📌Words: 588
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 11 June 2022

When it comes down to saving yourself or a loved one, who would you choose? Would you sacrifice your own life for theirs, or save yourself and leave them to die? In any life threatening situation, survival always requires selfishness. Saving others before yourself can end with no one alive. In dire situations, selfish acts can increase the chance of you surviving and survival is an instinct we can not control. One person living over the other isn’t just luck, but requires an act of selfishness to ensure survival.

To begin with, saving others before yourself can end up saving no one. Stated in, Is Survival Selfish?, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson were climbing a mountain together. Simpson slipped and was hanging off the cliff and Yates tried to keep a hold of him but, to save his own life, Yates cut the rope. If Yates hadn’t cut the rope that attached them two together, he would have fallen off too and may have not survived. As a human race we have to think about what is best for ourselves and what would help us live for as long as we can. On planes, they always say, “put your oxygen mask on first, before helping others”. Selfishness happens all the time. Jumping off a cliff because your friend is falling isn’t going to save them. Running into a burning building to save someone can end up killing both of you. To survive, a person needs to be selfish, and in being selfish that means you can’t save others, because not both can survive. All in all, in a survival situation, if a person wants to survive, then they have to be selfish and choose their life over the other person’s.

Continuing, performing selfish acts increases the ability of one’s survival. In the story, A Chance In The World, Steve Pemberton had to steal food from other people and hide it in his basement to survive. Stealing the food was selfish of him, but that was the only way he could live. If he didn’t, who knows how long he could have survived down there. Selfishness is not always a bad thing. It may not be helping others, but helping yourself is just as important. Committing acts, like stealing food, helps a person live to see another day. Somebody can be living in a horrible state and the only way to survive is to help yourself, which may harm others. In conclusion, performing selfish acts increases the likelihood of a person surviving over another.

Finally, survival is an instinct that we can not control. In The Leap, a trapeze artist named Anna was performing a trick with her husband. As she was swinging from one rope to another with her husband, they were both about to fall, and Anna had a little second of an opportunity to catch onto her husband and maybe save him. But instead, she let go of him, caught onto a different rope, and her husband fell to the floor and died. When placed in a life threatening situation, we don’t have all day to think. Every decision has to be made on your toes in a matter of seconds or you're going to die. And in those few seconds all we are thinking about is, how can I survive in this situation? No one is thinking about how we can save someone else because there is no time to think about. Our instinct is to survive, and that can be selfish, since we are sacrificing another's life so that we can live. It's a natural reaction, but we can't control it because instincts happen the way they do. At the end of the day, survival is an instinct that controls every decision we make in our life, which requires selfishness.

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