Is ignorance truly bliss?

Do us a favor and reread your blogs a few times before submitting it.

As far as what I think you were getting at...

You are right in that ignorance is pricey, and not so blissful. Being that narcissistic and self-focused will eventually lead one to utter alone-ness. Though life is generally an alone experience, it should never be a lonely one. In this I mean, we should always be aware of the world around us, just as our world should be aware of us. It is part of that community living, treating others as we also want (or need) to be treated.

Along the same lines, education is also quite expensive, and not just the student loans that we will be paying for 50 years or more. I have noticed that things I once appreciated before knowing what I know now seem small, trivial, even stupid. Even people from the place that I once was seem so far from me. Because of my education, I have sacrificed my ability to relate to certain people and the way that they think. Does that make sense? Because I've changed the way that I think, I have also changed my culture, or the type of community in which I prefer to live, the type of people with whom I choose to commune with. This has meant losing relationships, simply because I have lost the ability to relate to the same people because of my education. Ignorance is bliss in some ways. However, I wouldn't trade it for anything I have lost. Ultimately, you are right.

http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/kariskoett

"All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else."
-Buddha

"If we were not ignorance, and compared our problems to that of the rest of the world we could see just how insignificant a chemistry assignment is compared to absolute starvation."

You have already divorced yourself and your peers from the rest of the world with this quote. Did you stop to think about how much more unbearable life would be for those suffering absolute starvation if they spent their time comparing their problems to those of college kids in the US?

But beyond that, most people who become aware of the injustices in the world and who dedicate time to contemplating them, end up significantly less content than those in complete ignorance. For example, I personally draw no comfort from comparing my problems to those of child prostitutes in Cambodia; their suffering does not make mine less, it makes it more.

Some people are very proactive, they actually turn around and dedicate their lives to helping those who are suffering most in the world. But most of us don't, we just add a slow burning sense of shame, cut with apathy, to our existing problems. We care and it hurts, but very few of us move beyond suffering in our awareness as we realise how blissful it is not to be aware of the level of abject poverty and suffering millions of people live in around the world. We try to tell others about it, but they just nod and shake their heads, most would rather you talked about the latest American Idol or Facebook instead of laying a heavy bummer on them.

"Being knowledgeable isn’t just about facts and event, it’s about choosing not to ignore those facts and events"

Being knowledgeable is actually just about knowing facts and events. If you know about those fact and events, then you have not ignored them, you know about them; you are thus knowledgeable. Choosing to act upon said knowledge in a proactive manner would be something else; perhaps courageous or caring.

"Ignorance is not bliss. The more we know about something the better equipped we are to help others in those situations."

That's quite romantic, but unfortunately in many cases the better equipped a person becomes and the more knowledge they accumulate on the subject, the more apathetic they become. They start to realise that the people with the power to make a real difference won't. They start to realise that they can't help or reach more than a handful of people, then they descend into apathy. Many deal with this by volunteering for charities for a month or two, that helps alleviate their sense of guilt and helps them to believe that they are making a real difference. But many realise that they are usually just treating symptoms, because they are pretty much powerless in regard to remedying the cause.

Don't get me wrong, there are people and charities who dedicate their lives to tackling the causes of injustice, but they are a far cry from the volunteers I've met while traveling; they all seem to be more concerned with telling everybody that they are volunteers than they are about actually making a change. I remember talking to the Spanish guy who worked professionally for a charity in India, he was telling me how sick he felt listening to volunteers bragging about their volunteering.

This guy put his money where his mouth was, he worked full time for a wage to help. He said many volunteers just treat it like some kind of status thing; like the latest fashion for backpackers. He said, that if half of them helped as much as they told people about their volunteering, then the world would be a much better place, because they continue to tell people about their volunteering for the rest of their lives, whereas the actual volunteering only lasts a month or two.

The point is, that those volunteers are less knowledgeable than the full time charity workers. This enables them to skip into volunteer for a few months out of their entire life and just as easily skip blissfully back home and pick up the privileged life they left on hold, while feeling, genuinely, that they have made a really big difference. Those that stay on full time realise that it takes so much more than that to make a difference; like dedicating time to making volunteering attractive enough as a form of adventure holiday so that enough of them volunteer to keep charities running, because they can't get enough full-timers. They can't get enough full-timers because ignorance is a lot more blissful than facing up to awareness.

"The more we help others the less focused we are on our own problems, and ourselves thus the happier we are, the more blissful we are."

The Spanish guy I talked with was on his two weeks off from work, he intended on getting as drunk as possible for that two weeks, because that was how he said he forgot about work. He had to be blind drunk before he could enjoy the bliss most of us enjoy through our ignorance.

_____________________________________________________________
I am the people my mother warned me about.

http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tuffgong

TUFFGONG
Senior Executive Administrator™

This is why geniuses end up killing themselves.

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