Lent 2015: Day 28

[dreamflower]

“You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Comments

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

What a wise quote.

[dreamflower]

It really struck me as profound.

[shirebound]

Ooooooh.

[dreamflower]

Uh-huh.

[meneleth.livejournal.com]

Good advice!

[dreamflower]

It really is. After all, people can tell when someone is not sincere, and sincerity trumps original.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

There's this idea we talked about in my ethics classes, the paradox of hedonism. The idea of hedonism isn't all about Greek bachanaliae and orgies and the like, it just means that the right thing to do is what satisfies our desires, and that some desires aren't nobler than others except to the extent that we really care about them - helping orphans in India is important because there's an innate human drive to want to help others, but that's not better than (say) the desire to go out to a movie except that you actually care about helping the orphans more.

The paradox is if you actually think you're just going to do whatever would make you happy, that's a really bad way to actually become happy. If you want to satisfy your desires, you need to go to college, get a good job, learn a language and travel the world, fall in love - but if you just do these things because you think they'll make you happy, as opposed to because you think they're actually good to do, it will all seem shallow (even if it isn't). The point is that while we might be trying to satisfy our desires, being aware of that fact (ironically) makes the whole project blow up.

Seems like that's not the only goal where you run into this problem!

[dreamflower]

And CS Lewis would say that as long as we are thinking only of our own happiness we will never achieve it, because that's not our purpose for being in the world. He would also say that if we achieve our purpose, we will find joy, and that's even better.

Our own happiness might even be a side effect.