Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living
Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Within the
university, students and professors scrutinize every possible aspect of our
universe-from the billions of galaxies to subatomic particles, electrons,
quarks-but they assiduously avoid examining their own lives. In the wider
world, we keep heretically busy and fill every free moment of our day with
some form of diversion-work, computers, television, movies, radio,
magazines, newspapers, sports, alcohol, drugs, parties. Perhaps we distract ourselves because looking at our lives confronts us with our lack of
meaning, our unhappiness, our loneliness-and with the difficulty, the
fragility, and the unbelievable brevity of life. Pascal may have been right
when he observed that “if our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it…the sole cause of our
unhappiness is that we do not know how to sit quietly in our room.” One of my Harvard students stated during a class discussion that “living a human life is a scary business.” Perhaps the reason we find it so difficult to sit
quietly and examine our lives is because doing so makes us anxious. But
until we examine our lives, we can do little to make them less unhappy and more fulfilling.
– Author Unknown