Nothing is Entirely Bad #023
The positive sides of being unwell
Hello, and welcome again to Every Dawn. Today, I'm sick. You can probably hear and see it—I'm not well. Over the past few days, I've been in bed with a fever, which is why there was a gap in these videos. It was not quite "every Dawn," but I wanted to make this video today despite being sick and still in bed. While lying here, I've been thinking about the value of being ill, of not being well.
We normally, and I too, tend to think of it as something that just disrupts our plans, disrupts our everyday life, and we wish we were always healthy. But if you think about it, there is value to being ill, to being sick, or any other negative experience in our lives—to lose someone we love or to have an accident.
Why are these things valuable? We can ask ourselves why it is valuable at all to live. What is the point of living a human life? Of course, this has been asked forever in the history of philosophy, so there is nothing new I can add to this. But one of the answers, if we don't believe in religious explanations, would be: we live just in order to experience it. The point of living is to experience life.
From this perspective, then the question is: When do you experience life most? Do you experience life when you have only the good sides, when everything goes well, when you're happy? Or do you experience life better, perhaps, when you have all these negative experiences? It is not only that during the negative phases of our lives we feel more alive; we have stronger feelings, more memorable feelings. I can, for example, remember negative periods of my life much better, even if they are very far in the past, than I can remember the positive. Very often, the memories of positive events, after a while, get forgotten, or we confuse them, or we just remember them in a hazy way. But we have very precise memories of negative things that happen to us.
This is one reason — negative events give us a much stronger memory, a much stronger feeling of being alive, of experiencing things that we don't easily forget. But another reason is a little more general. It is the idea that our experiences, if they are to be universal, if they are to be representative of what it means to be human, of what it means to be alive, they must include the experiences of all others who are human, who are alive.
If I live in a protected bubble where I'm rich, isolated away from the world all my life—let's say, as an extreme case—then I'm not making experiences typical of being human. If, on the other hand, let's say I have grown up in relative poverty, perhaps I have traveled and seen places that are poor, where there is human suffering, perhaps I've had some suffering myself from bad things happening to me, in all these cases, my experiences connect me much stronger with what it means to be human, with what is the typical human experience of life.
So, at the end of a life like that, you will be able to say, "I have lived a full human life," not one that was just sugarcoated and empty, but one that is full of experience, one that connects me with experiences of every other human being on Earth, one that helps me understand the problems and the plight of others, one that makes me a fuller, more rounded, more complete human being.
And so, this is what I realized lying in this bed, and then suddenly, I was not anymore sad or disappointed at being feverish on the first day of my holiday, but instead, I was happy that I had had this experience, that I had shared this experience with so many others who also are ill and in bed for various reasons, perhaps also on the first day of their holidays.
That's it. What I wanted to say for today. Excuse the bad sound—it's from the street there, and you can hear the cars, and here are the cicadas, the insects that are singing louder than I can speak at the moment. But I hope you can manage to hear me. See you again tomorrow. Bye-bye.