So, after yesterday, I still haven't come to a conclusion on whether seeking the truth is more fufilling than living in stagnant happiness. However, I have thought more about the negative and positive effects of both situations.
In the case of living a routine life, with complete satisfaction, there will never be any challenge or something to thrive for. However, one will forever be happy. Why change that?
Now, the other side of the discussion- searching for truth seems to bring more argument. In my view, most of the time when a person goes seeking for the truth or seeking for something better, the person gets hurt. Take, for example, Michael Jackson and Ana Carolina Reston. Jackson is someone who continually believes that he can look better and there is always something he can fix to make his life better. Look at him now, he looks like an emaciated animal. He may think that he looks healthy, but his body definately is not. Ana Carolina Reston is another example who has taken seeking the truth to an extreme. Reston was a Brazilian model who suffered from anorexia. I use the past tense because she literally starved herself to death. She is not the only example of a person who believes his or her life can be better if they were only a bit skinnier. She continually thought that she could be thinner and more beautiful, even at the point of sheer skin and bones. Again, she may have thought she was healthy, but she evidently was not.
Of course these are some extreme examples, but more and more people everyday fall victim to these types of situations. The phrase "you can never be too rich or too thin" symbolizes a part of this longing for something better. If we are always searching for something that is not there, that we think might be just a little bit better, we can really hurt ourselves- physically and emotionally.
1 comment:
Hmmm, I'm not sure that trying to continually alter your appearance to achieve some ideal is the same as trying to rid oneself of false beliefs or doing all that one can do to improve oneself. It seems to me that the person who focuses on appearance is misunderstanding what improvement means.
Perhaps the question comes down to what constitutes improvement? Developing your mind, becoming clearer on what you should believe or is it holding on to what you already believe and trying to get others to agree.
What really is going to lead to a fulfilling life? Those who have had fulfilling lives, how have they lived? Wouldn't you want to know what path is more likely to lead to happiness than to go down the wrong path (as it appears some folks do as they seek happiness through appearance and staying young)?
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