Strangely, Selfishness Increases with the Age whereas it should be other way round

    I have keenly watched and notice that selfishness increases with the age. I mean selfishness to certain aspects of material life. Selfishness towards one's  health in old age should certainly increase with the age. But here I mean overly self- centered, self serving, stingy to others both emotionally as well as materially. As if life start revolving around few. The opposite of selfishness is self sacrifice who supports and help others. 

    It bothers me because my understanding since childhood was that with age one become experienced, exposed,matured and practicality of life makes one to understand the meaning of human life better and also the mortality. Life is not immortal and everyone has to depart and this should teach us more compassion, more support to others, more giving and helping. This is my understanding of  life maturing with the age ,inculcate the sense of giving  and preparing yourself to depart on a happy and giving note. 

    But in fact the happening is completely opposite. The more people ages they become more self centered  as if the have found the way towards immortality. I have seen several people start closing the doors on friends,relation,acquaintances and society slowly and beginning to spent their life with few chosen ones. I have seen and known many doing unnecessary mean things for material gain just a day before of imminent death. The question lingers why ? And that too in a country where hundreds of ancient scriptures are available as a guidance on graceful aging and preparing for the final day. But darkness beneath the lamp.

    It is like when you are child/young then you love your mother, father,siblings,cousins,neighbors,friends,almost everything around you and several activities as well. But slowly with age you start thinking that some of these are not special anymore and the older you get the fewer things interests you. And by the time you reach the ripe age then may be one or two things. Why this closing ? Whereas it should be more openness towards everything and all ?

I delved in the deep to understand why ? and still doing it.

Is the life teaches bad lessons to be like that ?

or Is old age stopping/liking  to meet too many people ?

or are people scaring?

or one love being alone in the company of few?

    I did not got any satisfactory answer of these.However I am also aging and will keep trying to find the most appropriate one.

    In the mean time tentatively what I think is that the hidden selfishness of young age become more visible as we age. In young age we love too many things and slowly with the age and diminishing energy we start loving few things and slowly to one or two things. So the selfishness was more visible since our love /action/involvement  has limited to few area. It reduces the number of persons in our life, when we love too many things/too many people then our self interest got divided in too many acts  and we share it with too may people. With aging slowly our world starts getting closer and closer ,memory on wane,  our view of the world localized to country, state,city , colony, house and then finally to one room. And in similar ways it started happening inside and we become self centered with few who matters or loving son/daughter or someone still arouse some interest . And this makes us more self centered, 

    So in nut shell I think that with aging we narrow down to few things, few relations in our life which we still think precious and that become pivot of our life. These few things become our life. We become things. Therefore for graceful aging one need to be careful of narrowing down to few things that we still love. If these aids in making us more self centered then we become more and more selfish. However the result would be different if the chosen few are not selfish then they can show the way our but it happens very rarely. The chosen few also supports it since they like it or have their own self interest. It becomes a environment and assembly  of self centered people  and one become part of it , fully submerged with no way out.  

    We stopped seeing others, we stopped believing others, we stopped helping others, we stopped giving others, we stopped seeing sunshine we become self centered thinking that sun has risen for me only. And the real death starts with these selfish thoughts and slowly we start killing our soul and become prisoners of these few things . We live only materially and thinking that this life will never end. But life and death never stops and the result of this is to die ignorant without being prepared. 

    So one need to be more aware and vigilant year by year not to be overtly self centered and keep enjoying sun shine with a compassionate and helpful heart.