Do I live to achieve long-term fulfillment or short-term gratification?
There is a paradox in this question… is my short term gratification not simply a part of my longer-term fulfillment? Now let me put it as plainly as I can: is an orgasm long-term fulfillment or short-term gratification? I think my point is taken. Not all short-term gratification is a bad thing. Long-term fulfillment is impossible without these waypoint along the journey.
This is not to say that a fulfilling, long-term relationship is not more satisfying and personally meaningful than a spontaneous liaison with somebody whose name you might recall next week. Indeed, the latter is incompatible with the former. Again, I resist the idea that there is a binary solution to this. The human heart is not simply a yes/no operation. And the root question seems to me to be more about the heart than whether a code is true or false.
Plato understood that the honest enquirer has to leave three options opened about any supposition: It is true, it is false, it is unknowable. Ah, the last is where the human heart resides. It is the realm of paradox, self-referential assertions that ultimately defy logical proof, the terrain of faith. Kierkegaard is said to have called faith a leap into the dark (but he was Danish… what do we expect from people that live on a cold, dark peninsula?) that is finally taken without knowing, may be attended to by anxiety and fear, and is only ultimately proven.
Since the question was taken from a somewhat smarmy self-help book (I went to the local book-store and saw it… Shall we say that my assessment in a previous entry was accurate?) it will, of course, tie fulfillment to having the most toys, achieving the most, in short it is the consumerist vision of fulfillment. I like to think that Gandhi was self-fulfilled – perhaps self actualized is a better term? – or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was making choices that would lead to a rich life, had he not been gunned down by an assassin whose choices were also motivated by his or her somewhat sinister vision of fulfillment. Really, the Hindu and Buddhists get this one right: self-fulfillment is a very western ideal, as if the ego is the center of all things. And they would hardly consider the act of choosing to be anything that could lead beyond the sound of the songs of the birds of desire. It would be the moment of being, in its beautiful emptiness, that would be key.
So, who wants to be self-fulfilled? Do I live in such a way as to both achieve short-term gratification and long-term fulfillment? Of course. Final answer? It is unknowable.
Ah, but I am only a fool…
