Opening page…
How do you tell rest from hiding?
The difference between restoring yourself and hiding from life may be hard to judge from within.
Your answer
A little context
It's Sunday afternoon and you've been on the sofa since lunch. Some weeks that's exactly what you needed, and you get up lighter. Other weeks the same sofa is where you go to avoid a phone call or a decision, and you get up heavier. From the inside the two can feel almost the same.
Nearby questions
- Is it right to bring a child into a world like this?A child can't agree to being born, and inherits whatever the world becomes. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm; most parents would call it the best thing they ever gave.
- If you had to choose, would you take a happy life or a meaningful one?Raising children, caring for the dying, making something difficult: the things people call most meaningful are often not the ones that make them happiest day to day.
- Does life have a meaning?The universe will not notice when you are gone, and in a million years nothing you did will show. Camus thought you could still be happy.
- Is the work Chippus were given worth doing?A task can be worth doing for what it makes, for whom it serves, or for what it does to whoever does it.
- Would you want to live forever?Bernard Williams argued that an endless life would end in boredom, because you would outlive every reason you had to go on. Others think there would always be another book, another friend, another morning.
