See my recent post first. If the answer is truly no, then you do not have to live anymore, because you will no longer be living. The caveat is of course that the types of threats that will end your life are probably not the things that are making you anxious enough to ask the question above, though they may masquerade as such.
As much as I want to have a vision of myself as a healthy 85 year old who looks back at life with satisfaction, I know that my current levels of satisfaction 50 years prior do not manifest themselves toward the sated ended of the spectrum. If, then, I'm honest with myself, I will assert and believe that 50 years will add approximately the same proportions of happiness/other emotions as I've dealt with so far, and so shouldn't think about my long term satisfaction as a proxy for dealing with the short term reality, or, importantly, to justify previous actions and shirk responsibility--i.e. to look at my actions as they were and not as I hope them to have been. By extension, to the degree that previous actions (and reactions therefrom) helped shape current belief systems, I cannot take my beliefs about how to act/be/react as facially accurate, though I recognize that one must do so to react to quickly changing environments. My fear is that I can much more easily conjure a quickly changing environment than to ask if I've made an error or whether one belief is inaccurate.
And I'm not talking about structurally wrong, or other conceptually huge problems. I want to disabuse myself of such abstruse mindsets that seek horizon based focal points to determine what will happen/what I will seek/decide/how I will act.
2 comments:
I will assert and believe that 50 years will add approximately the same proportions of happiness/other emotions as I've dealt with so far (...)
Why would you think that? For most people, life after its midpoint takes a sharp turn for the worse. Old age is quite painful.
Sure, that may be. My point was only that we shouldn't ignore the short term steps we can take to make life better now for the sake of an idealized (or pessimistic) future.
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