Absolutely right. Grab the money and retire as soon as you can - it's the only sensible way to go.
Absolutely right. Grab the money and retire as soon as you can - it's the only sensible way to go.
I don't know.. I really have no idea .
Sometimes we think we could be happy if .. we live in a bigger house.. have more money .. no work to worry about.. and... and ... and .. A long list of our wishes and desires and i have no idea if even after all that one can be happy.
Problems are the salt of life.. and no one is ever happy about anything . Later on problems will come out from no where even if its the perfect life.
"He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own,
The way the night comes when day is done."
It would be nice to live in a perfect world... but only for a brief time.
Sooner or later, that concept of perfection, like many other things in life, will grow dull, and quickly.
"We look at the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry." -- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
I agree. At first, everyone will be all happy and such, but that wouldn't last long. Eventually people would want change, and they would want out. Take The Giver, for example.Originally Posted by TheChilly
"I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking."
Of course I'd be happy in a perfect life, that's tautological. If I weren't happy, it wouldn't be perfect after all!
I guess it would depend on the definition of "perfect." I always assumed "perfect" met that nothing was distressing, that everything was easy. However, if a person thought that a "perfect" world was one with challenges and wasn't easy, then I guess we are all living in a perfect world.
I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty, I'm just glad to have a glass.
I just saw you sort of defined terms in the original post. Yet even with 'distressing things', it depends from what perspective one looks at it. If something distressing turns out to have a good overall effect on your life, is it still distressing, or, with hindsight, actually something good?
I don't think our current world is perfect at all, though I'm also not too pessimistic about it. It's a great question anyway. Extensive suffering is definitely bad, and should be eliminated if possible. On the question of whether 'a little' suffering is sometimes useful, I'm not quite convinced. Maybe up to some extent.
No. Conflict, strife and struggle are what keep me going and learning as a person. I wouldn't have any motivation if there wasn't a challenge or the risk of failure.
Naked except for a cigarette, you let your mind drift and forget your disbelief. Feel the chill down your back and the flutter of wings through dandelion fields, and forget the pull of gravity in a night without stars.
I lack eloquence and commitment to my arguments. They are half baked, and I will begin passionately, and then abandon them.
Society has shown that in times of economic boom, where there is high employment and a good quality of life for the majority, that crime actually increases dramatically.
So there is no possibility of a perfect life unless you are alone with one you love and surrounded by books, music and juicy steaks.
"Hell is other people" after all.
Latest Blog: An Impassioned and Immediate Response to Dan Hodges, Political Writer, Daily Telegraph.
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I have to admit I get really bored when my life is going well. I start thinking about doing something totally stupid and self-destructive...like going to this online spanking party or something.
I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty, I'm just glad to have a glass.
Ah, but if it bores you it cannot be considered perfect, can it? Your version of a perfect life would be what is perfect to you, maybe not what you expect or consider to be perfect.
It is all in the eye of the beholder, or rather in the individual definition of perfect.
/Claes
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I think the guys in the matrix decided to reject it not because it was "perfect," but because it didn't give them real or true knowledge about the world. Of course, one could say, that the matrix indeed was not perfect for exactly this reason. In other words, a prefect world has to give one real or true knowledge about it.
Your notion of perfect is, I think, currently how most of us tend to see it.
But by this definition of perfect, "I mean a world in which nothing distressing ever happens and no need goes unfulfilled. There are no problems of any sort," when you say your live is "tranquil and perfect" it's not really prefect. As pointed out by Claes, this is in virtue of (among other things) your boredom, which is a symptom of an unfulfilled need. If one can soundly argue (let's assume that they can) that humans need stress to some extent, and if the only way to solve your problem of boredom is by introducing distress, then a perfect world, by this definition, becomes an oxymoron. In other words, to need distress makes your conception of a perfect world unattainable to humans: it is an utter impossibility to have no distress and to fulfill every need simultaneously; and this, in itself, is a huge problem, which contradicts the definition further.
As for the commonsense concepts of "heaven," which generally ascribe to similar definitions of perfect, we encounter similar problems.
So I think we need a better definition of perfect. On a commonsense level the perfect world should be the world that makes one happiest. But how can most people's commonsense conception of perfection then be heaven, one might ask? The best conclusion, I would argue, is that people generally don't know what makes them happy (that is, along with the pleasures a daily dose of obstacles to overcome). But I digress!
If we keep the first intuition that perfection entails happiness, though, then, in this perfect world a perfect amount of suffering would exist. This goes against the general notion of perfection but granted all the premises is a valid inference.
To be continued...
Last edited by Cunninglinguist; 01-17-2011 at 06:53 PM.
If it's perfect, then we'd always be happy, right? From start to finish--womb to dust? Then there'd be nothing in contrast, nothing to judge it against. Happy wouldn't be happy--it'd just be the norm.
I want to play. I really, really do.
When I was a teenager, and still a practicing Catholic, I was terrified of turning into a barren spinster, and attempted to negotiate with Christ over the matter. I never had a beau in highschool, ever. I was the only disabled student in the district, and was accepted in class, but not socially, except when my mother managed to get every hottie I had a crush on to show up for my sweet 16. Never translated into a boyfriend, so most of my sexuality wrapped itself into my teachers, married or not. Ditto university, except toward the end I had a brief and not very pleasant relationship with a 23 year old more screwed up than I was. My only disabled liason proposed marriage when I was in my early forties, and had I been more assertive, I could have spared us both the fact that he disgusted me, but I tried very hard, and it is only through my failure with him I discovered that what my blind married friends tried to tell me was right, that spousal relations don't necessarily complete you, and so here I am, a spinster more happy to be alone than to take the trouble assuring male virility. Still, I sit here, through the looking glass, knowing how much I might have had to offer if someone might have been able to love me for my own sake, except that, you really would not be what you are in an alternate skin, and Lionel Shriver's excellent work suggests you might have wound up in the same place anyway, even if you had made other choices.
One of my favorite books at the moment is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. What I found interesting about this book is her concept of heaven.
Heaven is sculpted by each person's point of view. It smells differently for each person, and it has different landscapes and activities. Oddly enough, a person may not meet the people they love right away who have predeceased them. Heaven expands and offers more as the person grows emotionally. For instance, the main character didn't initially see a beloved grandfather in her heaven until she started to let go of her unrequited desires for life on earth.
That is actually very close to my idea of the afterlife. It isn't the concept of perfect that is popular, but it would probably be very satisfying because there would still be challenges to interest us.
I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty, I'm just glad to have a glass.
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