I have been thinking a lot about the idea of sacrifice lately (not the kind of sacrifice we make for others, rather the ones we think we make when we go for a workout and ignore our desire for fast foods). I think I’ve come to some interesting conclusions that I’d like to share.
First, I was pissed for being required to sacrifice my pleasure and comfort in this moment for gains in the future. What gives the future such an authority over the present moment? After all, the ‘I’ that exists in the present should have just as importance as the ‘I’ that lives in the distant future. Why does his well being trump my whims?
When looking for the answers to these questions, I realized some things.
First, there is no me in the past, present or future. There is just ‘me’, spread throughout the space time continuum. And there is no sacrifices either. There are just tradeoffs. When I sacrifice getting lost in the dopamine rich, continuous hits of pleasure that comes from shuffling the home page of Facebook or Instagram, just like a gambler playing the slot machine, I gain some thing else. I gain mental clarity, peace and TIME. Yah, time, the most precious resource in the whole omni-verse. Time, the resource that even Jeff Bezos- with all of his billions of dollars, can not buy. Time, whose productive limits are only bound by your own imagination.
So long story short, if there were a sacrifice made in such a situation, it would have to be when you do the wrong thing. When you chose to stay longer in that dopamine rich artificial-social-environment created by those apps, and let go of your overall well being and time. This is the real sacrifice.
You sacrifice each time you take a cigarette puff. You sacrifice your health and your integrity. You sacrifice the same things each time you consume sugar.
Would you ever pay 20 bucks to get something that costs only 5? I don’t think so. But we make similar mistake when instead of money we deal with other types of resources. We take 5 minutes of sweet sensation in our tongue and pay for that with a life time of diabetes. Genius!
RaihanRiad 