Why is it so hard to do the right thing? I think its because the best (and therefore right) way is almost never the easy way.

My dad used to have a sign in his classroom that said, “Hard work isn’t easy.” He could point to it when students said, “this is hard.”

What is it about people that makes us always choose the easy route? Selfishness isn’t sufficient to explain it because we often choose the easy way even when we end up being the loser ourselves. After spending some time thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that it might be a matter of education. We cut corners because we aren’t completely familiar with how it is going to affect us. But I’m not even sure that can really answer it, because we often find ourselves purposefully ignoring the latter effects even when they are well known to us. We are so often willing to sacrifice the future for the now even knowing the future cost will be 10 times that of the now.

So it might really come down to selfishness, but it is selfishness of the “now me.” The “future me” is a different person, and one that I don’t care about nearly as much as the “now me”.