Monday, December 9th, 2013
The Pleasure-as-a-driving-force Concept
"Il faut manger pour vivre et non pas vivre pour manger."
This is the quote I remembered during AP World. It was said in Moliere's play "The Miser". It states that one has to eat to live and not eat to live. It is true that many humans nowadays (I say many because it is not the case for all) do not live in order to survive. Nowadays, many of us are driven by the pleasure principle. Most of the people around me live to eat, in the sense that they do things for the sake of doing them, not in order to survive, not for a deeper purpose. The thing is, most of us, or at least the people around me, do not see the necessity of struggling to survive. We have things besides us, we do not need to fight in order to have food upon our table.
This just made me think about the point society arrived nowadays. Whereas people, in the past, needed to focus their efforts, consecrate their knowledge, in order to optimize their chances of survival, people nowadays have the liberty to think about more "trivial" things.
But then, in some sense, technology became a big part of our lives, almost to the point that we cannot survive without technology. Some people may argue that this is psychological, that were we to try, we would manage to go along without technology. But then, who knows? Are we really driven by pleasure principle, or is that "source of pleasure" actually becoming a source of survival?
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