In fact, politics is the only way a society resolves important social questions peacefully. The alternative is to resolve them not-peacefully, i.e, war.
My mother would not trust me to go to the store to buy anything (even now she doesn't 😂).
Politics is the art coming to a rough consensus or at least agreeing to disagree in a civil way.
It is the same politics as in a household or a team, just a lot more complex.
Technical fields go politically out of fashion and later come back in fashion. There is no "objective" way to understand the process except in terms of politics and personalities.
I mean it as "figuring out people and their motivations and forging a rough consensus to act on"
My interest in politics and my political awareness from childhood is what (inadvertently) prepared me for the challenges of a running an organization.
The answer is necessarily contextual. The self-interest of people in a pandemic is to stay alive, for example.