Unexamined Life + Modern Gadfly

Is the unexamined life worth living?

Interesting question. Before I even considered taking Philosophy, a question I often found myself thinking about was "what am I living for?" We live in a world where it can sometimes be difficult to do the things that make us happy because they aren't "practical" or won't truly benefit us as we become established adults. I personally think everyone should live to be happy and I've always wondered why that's not the way it is. To answer the question, do I think an unexamined life is worth living? No. How enjoyable can life be if you're just going through the motions of living? I believe the true joy of life comes through creating your own individual experiences and figuring out who you are as a person. In all honesty, you simply cannot create yourself and your own bank of experiences if you stick to what everyone tells you. Things need to be questioned, that's just the way it is. How would a world with no questioning be? Sure, at some points the question "why?" can be quite a nuisance when you don't have an answer but at the same time that simple question causes so much information to blossom to more and more things to share. The world needs that.

Modern-Day Gadfly

Trying to rack my brain to figure out a single modern day gadfly was driving me crazy. Admittedly I'm not very knowledgeable on many figures in politics, talk-shows, or anything of that nature. Going back to the discussion we had in class, children will forever be gadflies. The only difference between a child and Socrates is that children are more often not taken seriously. When I'm doing something around a child and that start to ask questions, in many instances I might say anything to them. Many times I only do it to feed their imagination but at other times it's just to get them to go away. I will say that sometimes I genuinely don't know the real answers to the blunt questions they ask when I thought I did. With young minds your answers are never enough and that has made my question why the answers I had where at one point enough for me.

Eulogy

      Gabriella was born on October 14, 1994 on a rainy fall day. At a premature weight of two pounds and two ounces, Gabby was placed in an incubator with fears that being born exactly two months early would cause her lungs to fail or other problems later in life. Those problems never surfaced. She was a happy child, but she wasn't a handful. Starting from her days in preschool, she was quiet, friendly, did what teachers asked of her and by 2nd grade her mother decided to put her into the gifted program. In her young, adolescent years Gabby was an avid reader. In class when others were reading Junie B. Jones, Gabby was submerging her eight-year old mind in the stories of Harry Potter. In addition to her passion for reading she had a deeper passion for dance. Her parents claim that when Gabby learned to walk she always walked on her toes and they took that as an indicator to enroll her in dance classes. At at four she took her first class at Mayfair Academy where she trained up until she was sixteen.
       As she grew older and transitioned into high school, her passion for reading died down but her love for dance did not. She became a dedicated member of the school's dance company Guys & Dolls and remained dedicated even though her enrollment in other dance studios changed and changed. One day something clicked for her and she realized that dancing was something she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Maybe it had something to do with the time she had a cast put on her foot but still managed to dance at a game her team worked so hard on. Maybe it was the time she developed a terrible knee injury a week before the GnD show and she was determined to dance through the pain, just because she couldn't let her team down. They were her family. Her dance family was just as important to her as her family at home. Like with her younger sister at home, her dance sisters fought, but they always knew the loved each other and Gabby always tried to set the example.
       Overall, she was a compassionate person who made people laugh just by being herself. I'm not saying that everyone loved her, but she didn't leave this earth completely alone. We must remember her legacy.