philosophical pwnage

realistically, sure, I worry about my future and what it has in store for me. I wonder where I'm going and whether I'm making the right decisions in life. I wonder about petty things like why I haven't finished reading my leisure books or why I made the purchases that I did. But that's beside the fact that I really don't know what I'll be doing within the next few years.

He called me last night and told me that his boss wanted to talk to me, which is weird because I've never met the guy and work is work. I stay out of his work and he stays out of mine. Our employment careers don't exactly have anything in common. It came as a shock to me when he told me that some stranger wanted to speak to someone like me. I'm not much for socializing with complete, complete, strangers and it felt odd that our jobs would clash in the way that they did. He told me that his boss, we shall call him Mr. Bossman, wanted to expand more on what he will be doing in the recent days, weeks, years perhaps. I hesitantly accepted to meet with him and I brought one of my other friends as reinforcements ("hesitantly" being the keyword because I had a buttload of philosophy reading to do that night as well as study questions). The meeting was set to approximately 9:30 pm. Ask me what time Mr. Bossman came, just ask me. No. You're wrong. He came at around 11 o'clock. That is almost 2 hours, maybe about 2 hours, of me and my reinforcement (plus him) waiting; just waiting in the cold wee hours of the night. The chilliness of the night started to strike my body as I started to shiver almost uncontrollably.

When Mr. Bossman finally arrived, he came with another fellow of the same business, dressed in ties and fancy shmancy office suits. Yeah, real legit. The rest was kind of a blur. I zoned out for most of his presentation, but basically, to sum it all up for you, all I heard was "money...money...I have a Porsche...money...you'll get a BMW...money...money...then you'll get a Bentley...money." And that night, all I could think about is how could someone like this get him to do a job like this; this pyramid scheme dealing with market networking. I zoned out only due to the fact that I'm not really a business-minded kind of gal, but I understood where Mr. Bossman was coming from. He had me questioning my future, which was what a good salesman does, and I was pretty befuddled that night. I was also pretty pissed at him for dragging me into this. But I was most sorry for my friend. He was sucked into the world of market networking against his will. One thing I don't like about salespeople are that they can be too pushy sometimes. If we don't want to do it, then don't let us do it. If we remain skeptical about it even after your presentations, then let us be skeptical. My friend ended up paying $600, money that he told me he didn't have. That fact just totally tied knots in my stomach. I couldn't believe me and my friend had been dragged into this. Just let us be.

This is where it gets interesting. Well, to me at least. Do you remember the philosophy reading that I had to do? The one that I could have been doing in leiu of this absolute waste of my time? When I got home at 12:30 am, all I could do was push through those pages in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics book with as much determination as I had left. It was then that I came across this line:

"Suppose, then, that the things achievable by action have some end that we wish for because of itself, and because of which we wish for the other things, and that we do not choose everything because of something else--for if we do, it will go on without limit, so that desire will prove to be empty and futile."

I thought to myself, damn, what a perfect line to tell Mr. Bossman. After a few pages, Aristotle started to inquire about a human's highest good (goal) in life. What are human beings made to do? Eyes are made for sight. An education is the goal of studying at school. But what about us? What is the highest achievement we can possibly grasp, being both complete and self-sufficient?

Aristotle proposes that our highest good would have to be happiness. He then goes on to talk about the candidates of happiness--pleasure, honor, virtue, and finally wealth.

Wealth. Money.

"The moneymaker's life is in a way forced on him [not chosen for itself]; and clearly wealth is not the good we are seeking, since it is [merely] useful, [choiceworthy only] for some other end."

This totally boggled my mind because not only did Aristotle totally just call out Mr. Bossman, but he made the most complete sense in the world at that specific point in time, the perfect thing I needed to hear at that moment of my life. Happiness is not about wealth, people. Money is an instrumental good; one that achieves nothing more than other wanted things. It has no direct or ultimate value in life. It's not a supreme good because it is used for some other end. Aristotle is conveying the most simple message of all: the highest good is one that is complete and self-sufficient; one that is pursued for its own sake and makes a life worth living.

And that, my friends, is how Aristotle PWNED Mr. Bossman.