The thought is triggered by the famous quotation, attributed to Socrates, that” the unexamined life is not worth living”. However, I think this quotation can still guide us today. Though it is hard to know what really in Socrates‘ head when he claimed this thousands years ago, based on the words, it encourages people to live based on thoughts and reason over basic instincts and desires. In another words, we need to make conscious choices.
The society begins to deviate from this old teaching, especially after the Romanticism movement. Human beings begin to realize, following instincts and desires is not envy, over the years, it has become the mainstream ideology. The best way to get rid of desire is to yield to it, as Oscar Wilder puts it. Slowly and steadily, we begin to live the life of instant gratification. Everything can be justified as long as “I like it”. We do things for fun, spend endless time watching TV, listening to music, without any guilty feelings.
Another fact is from the increasingly complicated modern world, so many uncertainties and unknown facts that we feel it is hard to make a conscious choice even with good intention. Lot of things we think is good, or ethically good, turn out to be the opposite. Besides, Existentialism also makes us feel, life has no ultimate goals or meanings, then what should we work for, if the goal is not assigned by God and human constructed goals are often wrong?
So as a result, lots of people return to hedonism, which holds that pleasure is the only intrinsic value. Together with consumerism, instant gratification becomes the major principle of our actions. Not only people want pleasure, they want it without any efforts and waiting.
Of course, we can’t say it is wrong to live that way. But it just feel empty, even with so much fun we have. We come to a stage of never being satisfied, never being fulfilled. The emptiness and numb are unbearable as well.
Anything worth doing takes time and effort. Acting according to instant gratification can never get you anywhere, it only kills you slowly.
Thus I propose to live a disciplined life, a life with some constraints, with some clear goals in head. Forgoing immediate satisfaction,constructing something in your head and committing to yourself of finishing it. Sounds simple, but without any supervision, we need strong self-discipline to realize it. The best motivation, is your ideas about what you want to live the life.
Do you want indulging in some shallow pleasure or do you want to make something big and unique? The choice is always yours.