Hi
@malakos - I like your many posts and am asking out of curiosity and not nit picking or trying to pick a fight.
Hello again.
But then you shift to a life of discontentment and resentment and “seem” to equate it to a long life. I’m sure that I’m misreading your post.
Can’t a long life be fulfilling?
My apologies if I’m putting you on the spot as that’s not my intention.
A life probably can be relatively long and also fulfilling. I think that would be the ideal kind of life to have.
A source of confusion here may be interpretative approach. I feel like a lot of other replies were more free and open in their interpretation. In my response, I tried to stick more to precisely what the OP said. This is typically the way I prefer to communicate.
The OP involved a deliberation between two options, indicated by the form "would you rather... or..."
One of the options was "a short fulfilled life". That's presented in a fairly straightforward way.
The way the other option was put was "live a long life
even if your not happy". I italicized part of it, because it is what I honed in on, and informed the way I responded in a way particularly relevant to what you're wondering about.
If we ignore that aspect of the option, we're left with a choice between a short, fulfilled life, and a long life of unspecified quality. This leaves open the possibility of the long life also being fulfilling.
I see this as missing what the OP was trying to get at. I think the OP was trying to present a tough dilemma that tests what one's priorities are. In this case, the choice is between longevity or quality of experience. If we allow for the long life to also possibly be fulfilled, it would seem to me to undermine the intent of the dilemma.
Now, returning to the italicized element, I believe this indicates that the OP was specifically trying to present the other option as one of a long life that was yet overall discontented. Interpreting it this way seems to clarify the function of the dilemma. It's a choice between a life lived briefly but brilliantly, versus a long life lived as if in the dreary, discontentedness of Limbo, at best.
Taking this to be the intent of the dilemma, the choice is an easy one for me. Life does have some inherent worth to me. I may still go through with the long dreary life, if the alternative were simply not living. But quality of life is a
very weighty consideration for me, and so if I were given the option of just a few more years lived gloriously, versus 6 more decades lived in a certainly dreary and miserable way, I'm fairly sure I would choose the former.