Ryu's Blog

I’m more and more inclined to think that enjoying the moments in life is equivalent to being alive. It doesn’t mean that people should focus doing only the enjoyable things or ignore the future. Enjoying the different moments in life are meant to be a broad concept that may include working hard on something and enjoying the achievement, engaging in a nice conversation, sports; basically any activities. It’s true that not all tasks are pleasurable, but many times we still have to do them to achieve certain ends. Money’s a common constraint in people’s life and affects people’s decision in life. For instance, people may want money so they can be free to do things they like in the future. I don’t think there’s anything bad in striving toward money.  It can act as a motivation to better ourselves and provide services to others. The best world would be to fulfill our life’s constraints while being able to enjoy them at the same time (let them act as means and ends at the same time). But no matter how much money, fame, knowledge, or achievement we have, or how good looking or in good shape we are, it doesn’t add anything to life if we don’t enjoy the moments—the everyday activity we do. Ultimately it’s the daily events we encounter and how we engage in these experiences that bring something more to life than just being a waking zombie.

Having said all this, I’m not good at living life and enjoying the moment. It’s easy to beatify the past or look forward to a wonderful future (at least at my age), but it’s much harder to enjoy the present activity. Perhaps because I’m too self-conscious or calculating, like the Homo economicus who constantly thinking about alternative choices or use of time and thus seldom being able to enjoy the present.  Living life this way’s like living in a world without color, missing out all the moments in life. Sometimes I feel bad cause people like me don’t add colors to the world and may even spread this black and white kind of life to surrounding people. Learning to live is like learning to paint and add colors to my world.