The question is: is the worth of life determined by how good you feel?<\/p>\n
While emptying the dishwasher a week or so ago, I overheard some dialog on the TV show Glee<\/em> in which suicide was a topic of discussion.\u00a0 The characters went around and stated something they were looking forward to in, I suppose, an effort to thwart depression.\u00a0 It reminded my a lot of the \u201cIt Gets Better\u201d campaign that went around the Internet not long ago.\u00a0 The message is: your burdens are worth bearing now because it will get better.<\/p>\n This seems to suggest that life is worth living because of the good feelings felt while living it.\u00a0 So what if you were a 93 year old with a terminal illness and went through excruciating pain every day, and it was only bound to get worse?\u00a0 Is it OK to go ahead and kill yourself because it doesn\u2019t get better?<\/p>\n There was recently an article in our local paper about a man who had the phrase \u201cNo CPR\u201d tattooed to his chest.\u00a0 Should he stop breathing, he did not want to be revived.\u00a0 Is that morally OK?\u00a0 If so, would it not also be morally OK to just go jump off a bridge?\u00a0 Since both rely on you making a conscious decision about living your life, what\u2019s the difference?\u00a0 Does the nature of the physical manifestation of the cause of death outweigh the nature of the preceding intent<\/em>?\u00a0 (That is, the intent to die to prevent further physical pain?)<\/p>\n At what point is physical pain so bad that it is OK to not want to live anymore?<\/p>\n If you are reading this, you are probably alive.\u00a0 Do you want to stay alive?\u00a0 If so, why?\u00a0 There may be a few possible answers:<\/p>\n – I am afraid of death because I don\u2019t know what awaits in the afterlife Is it not all about joy or the prevention of pain, either now or in the future?<\/p>\n I\u2019ll certainly admit that I do not currently have a concrete set of answers.\u00a0 I continue to ponder this issue.\u00a0 But wanting to die to prevent physical pain seems morally wrong to me, at least while such pain does not interfere with the mental faculties that allow you to wish for death.\u00a0 That is, tattooing \u201cNo CPR\u201d to your chest is morally equivalent to jumping off a bridge, though it\u2019s probably less physically painful.\u00a0 If you are wishing for death, then you are obviously in a mental state in which you are able to think of something other than just physical pain (such as the absence of it).<\/p>\n I do think it helps to not think of the joy of this life as an end in and of itself.\u00a0 That is, if we can understand that there exists an objective truth outside of our own existence, then our life must<\/em> be eternal.\u00a0 (Showing why this is so may make an interesting future blog post, for it\u2019s a leap many philosophers can\u2019t or won\u2019t make, such as Ayn Rand and Bertrand Russell.)\u00a0 If life is eternal, then it doesn\u2019t end with the death of our physical bodies in this world.\u00a0 (Though the nature of our existence without physical senses is unimaginable to us at this time, keep in mind that our consciousnesses are already<\/em> not physical things.)\u00a0 If life doesn\u2019t end with the demise of our physical bodies, then a lot of things we are naturally conditioned to care about don\u2019t actually matter so much.\u00a0 Such things include: perfect justice, fame, power, money, attention, school grades, perfect physical well-being, material items, and goals and dreams that are physical in nature (e.g. \u201cI want to be a movie star!\u201d; such materialistic dreams are very much encouraged by American culture, while watching others achieve them is often considered vulgar (\u201cGrrr!\u00a0 I hate the 1%!\u201d)).\u00a0 If life is eternal, material wealth and social status are ultimately irrelevant in and of themselves, because death in this life will rid you of such things.<\/p>\n The thing is: we\u2019re naturally conditioned to get joy from these things, and if life is worth living for the joy of it, how can these things not be life-worthy pursuits?<\/p>\n So I\u2019ll claim that, yes, pleasure and joy are worthy pursuits.\u00a0 But not in this life, where such pleasure and joy can only be imperfect.\u00a0 One must find joy in something not competitive or physically-based, something that is as eternal as life itself.\u00a0 (Such as, perhaps, love.\u00a0 And not just conditional love for some singular sweetheart, but love for all, even those that would do evil.\u00a0 Talk about unnatural!)<\/p>\n I suppose this all relates back to the old conflict of living in the present versus living in the future.\u00a0 For the most part, we naturally live in the future.\u00a0 The reason we do just about anything physically is to achieve some physical end; ultimately joy or the prevention of pain.\u00a0 But this also brings about anxieties.\u00a0 You don\u2019t kill yourself or let yourself die to take away the pain you feel now<\/em>.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing you can do about that.\u00a0 You do it to prevent yourself from feeling the pain you would feel later on if you weren\u2019t going to be dead at that time.\u00a0 (Of course, if it\u2019s just a few minutes or seconds into the future, we may refer to it as \u201cnow\u201d, but it\u2019s not really.)\u00a0 But if you only live in the present, you wouldn\u2019t eat, for example, and would soon die.<\/p>\n So I\u2019ll further claim that we can\u2019t stop living at least somewhat in the future.\u00a0 This is necessary.\u00a0 But we must balance how much we live in the future.\u00a0 If we find ourselves getting anxious (which naturally happens to everyone), then we are focusing too much in the future.\u00a0 We must physically live in the future to maintain our lives and well-being, but we must emotionally (or perhaps a better word might be spiritually<\/em>) live in the present.\u00a0 We don\u2019t stop ourselves from killing ourselves because our emotions will get better later<\/em>, but because we\u2019re not focusing on the world in the right way in the present<\/em>.\u00a0 Which isn\u2019t to claim that it\u2019s always easy to do so, just that it\u2019s worth living to try to.<\/p>\n Again, these are issues I\u2019m still pondering.\u00a0 But the thought that life is only worth the joy you\u2019re capable of feeling (or think you\u2019re capable of feeling), whether in the present or the future, strikes me as incomplete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The question is: is the worth of life determined by how good you feel? While emptying the dishwasher a week or so ago, I overheard some dialog on the TV show Glee in which suicide was a topic of discussion.\u00a0 The characters went around and stated something they were looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-jW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1236"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1900,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions\/1900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n– I am afraid of the pain before death; I don\u2019t want to experience it
\n– There is joy waiting for me in the future and it\u2019s worth waiting for
\n– I am experiencing joy right now that is worth remaining alive to feel<\/p>\n