One of my favorite things about this year has been lunch. Almost every weekday, several (if not all) of my coworkers and I gather in the library and eat our lunch together. Given that you have to be a special kind of person to take this job in the first place, that's quite the cast of characters. The conversations do not disappoint.
Most recently we discussed: is ignorance really bliss? When we say "ignorance is bliss," one coworker pointed out, "we're not talking about ignorance of who has the right of way at a four-way stop." We're talking about the big stuff. Infidelity. Incurable illness. Those sorts of things.
To help keep the conversation under control we settled on: if the world were ending in one week, would you want to know? We all said yes. We then quickly realized that if everyone knew the world were ending in a week, travel would be impossible, so we'd never be able to make it back to the lower 48 . . . so what would we do if we had seven days in Anchorage prior to the world's end?
Some highlights:
1. Not one of us would spend any time watching TV.
2. One of us would, however, watch this video "probably three times."
3. We all agreed that crashing a car into a house would be awesome.
4. We also wanted to see how fast our cars could go, drive a car off a cliff, and "execute a perfect J-turn."
So . . . is ignorance bliss? And what would you do if you had seven days left but couldn't spend it huddled up with your significant other or parents?
It's pretty telling/convicting to me that nobody would spend time watching TV! When I think about it, seven days left vs. seventy years left---with a finite lifespan either way, is "wasting" any amount of time actually permissible in either case? (My gut says 'no,' though I do enjoy my lazy veg-out times...)
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