Is Art a Waste of Time?
This article by Rhys Southan is very controversial to me and what I believe. Personally, I did not like to hear his opinion on things because it was so drastic compared to my beliefs. For example, Southan states “Suppose you saw a child drowning in a pond: would you jump in and rescue her, even if you hadn’t pushed her in? Even if it meant ruining your clothes?”. In my mind, I’m screaming why the hell wouldn’t I go help an innocent girl from drowning in a pond? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I just purposely let a child drown knowing that I could have saved her life. I believe that goes for everyone unless the person was mentally unstable. Then he relates this situation to poverty and how we ignore the people suffering from poverty as he calls a “preventable disease all over the world”. I have never really thought about poverty in that way because it is such a drastic comparison. It blew me away how he could remotely compare these two scenarios. Poverty is something that can be preventable or not. One can decide to gamble his or her life away with many things that puts their family and themselves on the streets. Everyone can decide to get a job instead of sleeping on a sidewalk. Ord and MacAskill, co-founders of Giving What We Can, suggests that everyone should donate 10 percent of your income to charity. My question is, why should hard-working people have to donate 10 percent of their income to those who might not even care about themselves and given up.
Rhys Southan also states that if you “have little to contribute to the cause. Perhaps they should think about ditching their dreams for what Caleiro call ‘an area with higher expected returns’ .” I agree that if life isn’t going the way you want it to go, and you are unable to be financially stable for yourself and if you have a family, then you should be thinking about maybe getting into a new career. However, if you are already financially stable and can support yourself and your family, I believe that you should never give up on your dreams. You should never give up on your dreams because life wouldn’t be fun or interesting if you hated your job. Some people have the luxury of doing what they love and getting paid for it. That is the ultimate life to me even if the job doesn’t contribute to the cause.
