Sophies world

Damaris Perez
Phil 111

Meeting a wealthy person always gives me the impression of success and happiness but according to the Story of a Good Brahman this is no necessarily true. In this story wemeet a man that even though he seems to have everything; money, a beautiful house, a good education and even 3 beautiful wives deep inside was filled with emptiness, full of worries and insecurities.On the other hand we meet a woman that was poor and ignorant but at the same time she was very happy and didn’t have any worries. Is this somehow a sign that in order to be happy do we also have to bepoor and ignorant? I follow Socrates, when he said “the unexamined life is not worth living” but then do we really prefer knowledge to happiness?

I personally don’t believe that being rich andhaving everything you want referring to material things guaranteed happiness but at the same time I think that having all those things will give you less worries and more time to do things you enjoydoing in life like for example I love to go hiking and being able to enjoy natural forest however I don’t do it as much because I am not wealthy and I have to work and study which gives me so little timeto go to the mountains and hike. I think I will be able to do so many things if I had the money and didn’t have to worry about bills, who knows? Maybe travel the world and go check out all thebeautiful countries out there, go to infinite numbers of tours around the world to meet all their culture and history without having to worry how much that will cost. No drought about it that will make mevery happy!

Likewise, I am also a firmly believer that ignorance can make a person happy, back home we have a saying “if your eyes don’t see it then your heart wont feel it” meaning it really cantaffect you what you don’t know. Is it good? Is it bad? I am not sure but the more I think about the more I think that if we didn’t know many things we would just live somehow happy and don’t have so...