How Good Are You?

by: Neil Millar

The demands of being a good person can sometimes mean sacrificing your own happiness .

You may have been raised to be a good boy or girl; encouraged to be a good worker, to be a good parent; to be a good friend; to be a good citizen… And I’m not saying that this is wrong; what questioning the effects of this on our individual happiness and the impact on our country.

Are we becoming happier more fulfilled people by being “good” or are we just a group of people heading nowhere but where we’re told?

If we continue to be good workers, will this ever allow us to achieve our full potential as human beings? If we continue to be good-parents, protecting our children when it is safe to empower them, will they grow to be all they can be? If we continued to be good friends, by sheltering our companions from the truth, will they ever get the information that is vital to their well-being? And if we continue to be good citizens who go along with what were told and are happy to leave the issues in the hands of the ‘higher’ authorities will we ever live alongside one another, full of love and accepting of our differences?

What does “good” mean anyway? In the “good old days,” good literally meant, “good!” But today good often means “average” or “normal”: about half-way between everything and nothing – on the pivotal point between life and death… one thing miss judged and out of kilter and suddenly we’re on the wrong side of life.

“Good” is also often about fitting in with the set of parameters set up by the people we associate with. This often involves giving pre-programmed responses to requests or behaving in an expected way – like telling your children not to do something at your parents home when you would allow them to do it at home or staying behind an extra hour or two at work because of the targets set by the boss. But the issue goes deeper…

Being good, or average or normal, involves following the pack. Buying the food advertisers tell us is good for us, even when it is laced with sugar, salt and hydrogenated oils that we know are bad for us. Being normal involves taking drugs for minor illnesses when our bodies break down even when we know our body often takes longer to deal with the drugs side-effects than the initial symptoms. We believe what we are told in the press without bothering to question the validity of a statement and the motivation of the people telling us. Blindly we follow.

We call people strange and odd when they try to escape the pack. My son recently asked, ‘Why do we have to be weird?’ The question comes out of feeling different to others and for a moment it hit me with a tinge of sadness until I remembered why we are “weird”:

We’re weird because we follow our dreams. We’re weird because we eat well, exercise regularly, hardly get ill and research as much as we can about things that affect our lives.

I ask you this: which is weirder – following the pack of “good” even when it is killing you or doing what gives you life and hope?

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