Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Being an Ignorant Pig

I've always believed that knowledge is necessary in order to achieve happiness. It's difficult to imagine a reality where I would prefer being ignorant instead of striving to learn, realizing at the same time that learning is a process which never really ends. However, if happiness is the point of life, does that mean that an ignorant person who is perfectly happy not knowing and not making choices about anything is worthless and just an "ignorant pig"? Maybe we all have different needs of stimuli in order to reach the same feeling of blissfulness, and perhaps the ignorant is already there, feeling just as happy as a fairly literal and curious person.

From a psychological point of view this makes sense if we note the difference between introverts and extroverts. Introverts are really sensitive towards their environment, which means that they don't really need the same amount of sensorial experiences as an extrovert to reach the same level of pleasure or the same adrenaline levels necessary to excite them. An extrovert, on the other hand, may look for a wider variety of experiences (such as clubbing, sports, etc) to reach those same levels (qualitative speaking) the introvert experiences when, for example, participating in an engaging discussion during class. Thus, maybe the difference between an ignorant and a knowledgeable person is similar in the sense that they're not aware or even interested in what they don't experience and actually may not even need to experience knowledge in order to achieve happiness.

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