Who decides whether something is meaningful or meaningless? I guess this is one of the reasons people need to believe there is God or someone who sets the rules for themselves. However, if we try to sift out what is imporant from what is not, we’ll face a lot of contradictions.
Recently I’ve been thinkin a lot about environment and pollution and I will try to relate my thoughts to these two. For example, we all know that there is a problem with the decreasing numbers of forests all over the world, but we all have, let’s say, photos (which are made of paper and paper is made of trees). How can we say which one is more important? To save a tree or to have a memory from you childhood, some event, etc.? There are a lot of fans of Formula 1 where the cars waste a great deal of fuel which is not only being exhausted every day, but also pollutes the environment, emitting greenhouse gases. Should we eliminate Formula 1 or the fact that it entertains people is more important? You could say that there are plenty other ways to entertain yourself but this is only one example. If you think in that direction you can try to convince yourself that almost everything can be useful and useless, you can justify or blame, but how can you decide whether it’s more useful or more useless? We can live without photos, but that way life would be more boring and grey, less colourful and enjoyable. Things like that make life more colourful and enjoyable. On the other hand you can say that real happiness and leading a good life don’t depend on outer influence or circumstances so if you truly care about the planet, you can do without all the things that seem to make you happier. But do people know how to live without those things? I doubt so. I think if we take them away from people, they’d confused and puzzled about what to do. We’re too dependent on a lot of things and we’re not ready to sacrifice them and live without them.
Perhaps a nice solution would be to look for something in the middle but everything is so relative that it’s not going to be an easy job either. It would be hard to do withouth limiting somebody’s rights or freedom. If, for example, we say that we should stop producing some magazines (in order to limit the use of paper and save the forests) which don’t have educational or intellectual content, then would everybody agree? There are millions of people who would protest. And isn’t it natural? Who can say which magazine is good enough and which one should be stopped in order to save paper? In my view, it’s this magazine, but in your view it’s that magazine. This is what freedom is about – everyone has the right to issue his own magazine.
I’d repeat myself saying that this is only an example. It could not be a magazine, it could be everything. What should we do in order to have it both ways?
