055 Choice transcends sacrifice
If you're working a job you hate to support a family you love, you aren’t making a sacrifice for your family. You're choosing this because you'd rather have your family eat dinner than not somehow tolerate your job for 40 hours a week.
The desire to see your family go to bed with a full stomach outweighs that of quitting your dreaded job (if it means no more dinner for the family). Hence you choose to persevere. Call it a sacrifice if you will, but a choice if you realize the agency behind the things you do.
Choice transcends sacrifice. When you’re choosing to trade off a relatively inferior option for something more meaningful, it’s not apt to call it a sacrifice.
Similar for people in the army (all of whom I have high respect for). “Sacrifice” won’t capture the essence of their work. Choosing to risk their lives, fight and portray their admiration for the country will.
When I hear something along the common lines of “all the sacrifices he made…” I cannot help but feel sorry for the man who chose his actions that seemed sacrificial to all those who could not understand the true meaning of and purpose behind his actions.
With higher value comes choice, not sacrifice.
The Amazing Things & Ideas List
Books I’m reading:
- The Mind of God by Paul Davies
- Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering by Cameron Hanes, Joe Rogan (Foreword), David Goggins (Afterward) (Audiobook)
What really matters:
“It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling
Debunking the “finish your education” myth:
“Education isn't something you can finish.”
— Isaac Asimov
On choosing our measure of success:
Lifestyles — a blog post by Morgan Housel
Posts published on my blog this week
Is human intervention “unnatural”? If yes, does that make it bad? Or is, as may seem obvious, human intervention nothing but natural since it is a product of natural phenomena, rather nature itself?
Inspired by a live discussion between Slavoj Žižek and Yuval Noah Harari on the topic “Nature: friend or foe?”, this post explores these questions.
This post is a critique to Holden Karnofsky's “most important century” blog post series. Read why this isn’t the “most important century”.
Thank you for reading.
Onward,
Arjun
I get the sense that this may be a cultural difference, in that a sacrifice in the Western Christian tradition is a choice made between different options, with the understanding that you make this sacrifice for a greater purpose. Choices without sacrifice are ordinary decisions. But there can be no sacrifice without choice. If you don't have a choice, then it wasn't a sacrifice.