It is the ego or a false sense of self that makes you feel the need to frame your decisions as things done for someone else. It is an effort to avoid full responsibility for your actions & to place others in debt to you without their involvement. It's the creation of covert contracts where you expect others to hold up the end of deals there were never really made.

Even gifts are things you give to someone else for your own benefit. If you give a gift that carries with it some sort of debt or obligation, then it isn't actually a gift, it's an attempt at some sort of rotten or dishonest form of trade.

Everyone lives for themselves. There is no other way to live. The closest one can get to an exception to this law is in becoming a parent. And even then, the best thing you can do for YOURSELF is to be a good parent. It just so happens, that what is good for you is almost always in alignment with what is good for others too.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people with such a poor capacity for second & third order thinking that they don't actually understand where happiness comes from.