Dancing
So I have a question: Is it better to live a life of self-fulfillment - achieving that which you care to achieve, with no regard to whether or not it's the best path? Or is it better to live a life in which you represent the best of your talents and abilities to the rest of the world, and make the world a better place?
I fight with this daily. =(
I feel: Conflicted -_-
6 Comments:
You must do what you LOVE, else your sanity will suffer.
KW
7:35 AM
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. White
6:56 PM
Savoring. Without understanding of how things are now, and how they are beautiful, amazing, and so forth, how could you ever improve it?
You can do what you love, and still feel unfulfilled.
There is no real answer - you have to figure it out for yourself.
6:19 PM
um... who are these people? Random or people you actually know?
I havn't replied because I knew it was going to be a pain to try and explain what I mean, and you rarely reply to comments, so ther's no reward to the dialog.
But anyway now that blogger is currently not broken, here we go... you show your bias in how you state that. Self fulfillment is done "with no regard to wether or not it's the best path" and "helping humanity" means using "the best of your talents and abilities". Why does self fulfillment to you, involve stifling your abilities? Why does "helping the world" mean your using all of your abilities?
I'm not sure why you have this drive to "help the world" which even you seems to think contradicts what you actually want to do. Even though you don't know what you want to do, and you don't know how you could "help the world". You seem to be setting yourself up for the whole, the grass is greener type thing. If you end up not as happy as you think you should be doing whatever it is you end up doing, your going to wonder with angst what the other path would have brought and if it would have been a better fit for you/your talents/whatever.
I think part of the reason for this is you feel external presure (maybe even not from anyone in peticular, just our culture in general) to live up to some ambiguous standard/measure of sucess you've applied to your projected future. You seem to be odd mix of not giving a fuck at all what people think and codependancy depending on who the person is and what the situation is. I think this may be a manifestation of that somewhat, you don't want to let someone down with your choice but you want to be fulfilled by what you choose and not to feel you squandered your tallents or time.
I don't know, like I said, hard to explain, let me know if any of that either makes sense or doesn't make sense... :)
7:15 PM
maybe you just dont like your self, which is why you figure doing what you want to do in your life cant possably be the same thing as doing something good for all humanity. You should really be asking your self if doing something that you decide helps the greater good is actually going to help you. I think that if people just helped themselves a little more over all the world would be better. And if it is about wealth then why not just make an effort to give back.
so my guess is that you just dont like yourself and you post a question like this so people will write to you and boost your ego telling you how wonderful you are for even thinking of the greater good...
OR you like your self to much and you want to show everyone how great and deep you are by asking publicly "big life questions" when in reality you have really no intention of doing anything with the answer...
blogging is so superficial but it does make great saturday afternoon entertainment...
2:32 PM
Someone anonymous. =P
The problem is this - if I could go off and do whatever I want, I wouldn't be here right now.
I'd be in Japan learning about ceramics or travelling the world, just making my way through Europe or what not.
The problem is that I know I'm better than that - I know I have more to offer. It just feels selfish to say, "Well, I know I have some talent and ability, and I can do good for people. Well, fuck em, I'm going to go do something marginal because I like it more."
Anyways, thank you all for your comments. =) The E.B. White quote was especially telling. =P
Eric, you know me best man - cut to the core of it. =0
As for the final anonymous... nah. =P Too superficial.
5:21 AM
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