Ainsley Stewart (Section #1)
SSHM CHAPTER 2
The central aspect of my final presentation that I will be elaborating and offering my own perspectives on is a person’s reason to go on living, working, or pursuing their passion or hobby.
First, I'm going to give a summary of the second chapter of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. This chapter’s overall theme is that despite the reality of life being suffering, each person must choose whether or not to live their lives in a hopeful light. In order to overcome the hopelessness of suffering’s prevalence, a person’s mind and soul must be “reborn” with a new attitude towards life. The way this “rebirth” comes about can look different for each and every person. Every person must find something that gives them hope for life and the will to go on. This “reason” is the way by which a person may make the choice to continue living. In order to make that choice, the person has to have a reason to do it in the first place.
William James experienced this hopelessness towards life. His resolution to be free, which was to believe in free will (therefore exercising his own free will) was what became his reason to go on. After reading Charles Renouvier’s Essais, James realized that free will requires a component of action rather than simply belief. To him, free will needed to be put into practice. He resolved to exercise his free will in deciding to continue to live, in spite of his feelings towards the world and its suffering.
While James struggled with losing his hope for life even after his resolution to exercise his free will, he continued to strive towards having a hopeful outlook towards his life. James’s reason to keep going was his realization that he was free. Wanting to live was a conscious, continuous, and free choice he made. It’s important to note that no one was forcing him to choose this path! He understood that it was something he needed to do for himself. He realized that he didn’t have to give in to suffering, and that he could live the happy and free life that he wanted. He kept going simply because he could, and because he felt that it was worth doing so. Living in and of itself is a good enough reason to live.
To summarize the overarching themes of this chapter: Continuing to live is a choice that a person makes. It is a very difficult choice while also being a necessary one. It is also a constant resolution one must make. You can’t decide to live one time and expect that attitude to persist through all of life’s troubles. Lastly, this choice is voluntary. It’s not one that you will be forced into. Suffering may outweigh pleasure in life as a general rule, but this doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the good parts of life as futile and pointless. The good moments are worth enjoying, no matter how small.
The power of choosing to enjoy life’s good moments. (By Shen Comix)
Right now, my inner critic is saying, “What if I can’t find a reason to live? What if I just don’t want to. You can’t tell me what to do.”
Well, I can’t. It’s your life and it’s your decision if you decide to continue onward or not. But! I’d say that even the smallest reason a person has for wanting to continue living makes it all worth it. In SSHM chapter 2, William James and his resolution to free will acts as an example of every person’s different reason for wanting to keep going. One thing that I’ve found in my own life is that no one reason is objectively better or worse than another. If getting to see your pet when you come home every day is the thing that keeps you going, then those moments are 100% worth living for. If eating your favorite brand of mac and cheese tomorrow is what gets you through the day without giving up, then that mac and cheese is so important, and you should treat it as such. Any reason you may have is, by definition, a good one! That reason gives you a means to choose to keep going. The fact that something as significant as your life (or your job, or your passion, or whatever you are considering giving up on) is at stake means that one reason, no matter what it is, carries so much more weight than you may realize.
The significance of your life. From the Tennessee Driver’s Manual, pg 114.
Another encouragement I would offer to anyone struggling with enjoying the small things: Be proud of what you love! Don’t be afraid to be excited about things you enjoy. If you feel that the things you enjoy are not worth caring about because other people think they’re dumb, those other people are 🚨❌WRONG❌🚨. Enjoyment is subjective, which means that you can enjoy something as much as you allow yourself to. If someone else doesn’t enjoy it, then that’s part of the subjectivity of it. There is no inherent fault in having a genuine joy for your hobbies or for the things that you love. Even more so if that thing you enjoy is what gets you through the day, or the month, or the rest of your life! If it matters to you, it matters. Period.
Your reason can be anything. This guy’s reason to go on is cheese! (By Martin Rosner)
Here are some of my own thoughts on my discussion question: Have I had an experience where I made a conscious choice to keep going?
I have, and it was mainly in relation to academic burnout. I’ve had to get over quite a few humps when going through high school, mainly in relation to my will to continue performing well academically. I mainly pushed through because, well, you’ve got to finish high school. It’s kinda really important! I’m glad that I finished high school having done as well as I did, but often it was rough finding that reason to pursue those A’s. I think the main reasons I pushed through were the promise of academic success (which feels rewarding), the knowledge that I would get to college eventually to pursue my passion, and some silly little video game characters that I love. There were a lot of doodles of Pokémon characters in almost all of my notebooks in high school. Even if a reason of mine wasn’t directly related to school or whatever struggle I was dealing with, it still brightened my days during those tough times.
Now that I’m at college, I’m really glad that I pushed through. Sometimes pushing through is only possible because of our reasons, no matter how small. The important thing here is that I made that choice to keep going. No matter how much trouble and hopelessness I had to go through, it was all worth it in the end.
"In order to overcome the hopelessness of suffering’s prevalence, a person’s mind and soul must be “reborn” with a new attitude towards life." This may be true for those who experience genuine hopelessness. Most of us, I suspect, experience a challenge to our hopefulness that is less debilitating. We don't require "rebirth," just renewal and what James called a "return to life"... New attitudes are always available, and don't usually require something so sweeping as being "born again" (even interpreted in secular rather than religious terms).
ReplyDelete"Continuing to live is a choice that a person makes" - But, for those of us who've never seriously contemplated the alternative (the overwhelming majority of us, I imagine), we don't experience this as a conscious choice any more than we consider continuing to breathe a conscious choice. It's just what we do.
"Sometimes pushing through is only possible because of our reasons" - And as Nietzsche said, if you have a WHY you can endure almost any HOW. And the good news is that the longer you persevere, the more reasons accumulate to keep on keeping on. Plus, if you've stayed curious and kept on learning, that curiosity alone suffices to keep you going with an ever-renewing eagerness to discover what's next.