The Unexamined Life is not one worth living, because you're simply not doing anything with your time. It'd be easy for all of us to just go through the motions of school, get a boring job, and settle down forever. But that's not what life should be about. It's supposed to be fun, happy, and whatever else we desire, but we have to think about who and what we are in order to do so.
I've never really made decisions for myself. My parents made me come to Whitney Young in 7th grade, join almost every program I've been a part of, and I can't even dye my hair until I move out. If I settled for this, I would be miserable. Living an unexamined life is just going along with whatever's going on around you and being okay with it. It took a year and a half, but I eventually realized that I was mad all the time because I was sick of doing whatever other people told me to. Also, I'd been stuck on the idea of being a doctor since I was 3, and never gave it much thought after that. It started to seem like a lot of work, and I was much more interested in staying up late to write stories after my family went to sleep. During the second half of 8th grade, I joined Company and told my parents I wasn't so sure about medical school anymore. It wasn't huge, but I was making my own choices and exploring other options.
Three and a half years later, Company's one of the most important things to me, and I want to study Creative Writing in college. I'm also generally less mad at the world. It's a process that I'm still working on, but I think it's hard to be truly happy until you have complete control over your life. We have to take risks and learn about ourselves. Living an unexamined life will just make you miserable, and everyone deserves better than that.
I agree with you that life should be focused more toward what each person wants to do with their own, but there still needs to be some form of balance between the things we do not want to do, go to work, go to school, etc, and the thing that we do want to do. Also, nice use of your own experiences to help strengthen your argument.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you talked about how people sometimes are just going through the motions of life. I also really liked how talked about your personal experiences and referenced how when your young many of the decisions are made by your parents. I thinks its cool how your starting to make your own decisions.
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, a lot of people can talk the talk about examining life but you walk the walk. And with philosophy that's definitely important. A huge problem people have with philosophers is that they can fall into this cycle of just sitting around and talking and not DOING anything.
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