What is meaningful in my life?

I never really thought about what gave my life meaning. I didn’t question it. It didn’t even occur to me to question it. Since we all die, and we don’t know what happens after death, what we do and feel like during life is what matters the most. That doesn’t mean we can go and do whatever we want and steal and kill people. We just have to keep living, but we have to live more. What matters are the happy moments, the sad moments and how you deal with them, and those moments where you almost die from laughter. That’s what is meaningful in my life. When I’m sitting there dying I won’t care about other things. I won’t care about what house I had or what car I had. I’ll care about who was in my house, all the memories from my house, all the trips taken in my car. There is no single thing or single experience that determines the meaning in our lives. Experiences make up the meaningful things in our lives.  Our lives are a series of moments. Whether we decide to embrace them all and go with whatever happens or sit there upset that everyone’s life has no meaning compared to the rest of the universe is up to us. So what if you die and after a generation or two no one knows you ever existed. Does it really matter if the people you never met know who you are? What matters is what you think, and whether you can honestly say you enjoyed life and found joy or meaning in the simplest of things. What matters is if you’re able to look back and smile and ignore the bad parts. You choose what you remember.

Do Candide’s punishments fit the crime?

The first punishment we come across is Candide getting kicked out of the mansion. I think this is a drastic punishment for something that just sort of happened. As we go along in the novel, it seems as though Candide isn’t exactly being punished, but more being taken advantage of. He just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot. When he gets tricked into joining the army, it’s just him being naïve. When Candide gets punished in the army for taking a walk, his punishment is also too drastic for a simple mistake. Candide didn’t know better. Some of Candide’s punishments almost seem like harsh karma. When he left Eldorado with his sheep, he left because of greed. He wanted to leave an utopia because he thought that he could have an even better life if he went back. This greed, combined with the fact that Candide trusts people too easily, caused Candide to lose most of his fortune. Candide gets tricked and his sheep get stolen.

So all in all, Candide’s punishments are definitely much too harsh. He is just naïve and gullible and people take advantage of him. Candide does do some bad things, such as killing people, but he’s just inexperienced with life and doesn’t know how to react quickly while keeping his cool. He does have to go on a long journey to run away after killing people, which I think is one of the only fair punishments. He gets separated from Cunegonde, which is another punishment since Candide loves her. 

How do I Know what I Know?

I know that the sky is blue. I know that when it rains, dark clouds come. I know that the sun gives us heat. I know that without the sun, we’d die.

                All basic ideas, and yet all of them can be questioned. Do we really know that the blue I see is the same blue as another person sees? Do we know, for sure, that we would die if the sun was gone? Could we possibly create an artificial replacement?

                But questioning those things seems crazy. We have to accept some things. Otherwise we’d be asking questions every second of every day. We’d end up coming to the conclusion that we know nothing. And that’s not exactly a reassuring thought.

                So how do I know what I know? Most things I learned from my parents and I accept them. I accept that my name is Klaudia, that I wasn’t secretly adopted, that my birthday is April 21^st, and other basic things. But there are other things, things we could say are more complex. I know that hurting people is bad. I believe that because that’s what I’ve been told from the very beginning, and I know that the people around me have been told the same thing. I’ve also seen that nothing good come out of hurting people. We can get into the specifics of the differences of hurting innocent people versus people who supposedly deserved it, but the main idea is to not hurt people. We should try to forgive and move on. Some things can’t always be forgiven, but we shouldn’t live in the past. Everyone makes mistakes. Which leads to another thing that I know: nobody is perfect. I’ve been told this for as long as I can remember, but even taking a look around proves this. People may come close to perfect, but no one is actually perfect. I know that I am definitely not perfect and I don’t think anyone would call themselves perfect.

                That is how people learn what they know: from their parents, other adults, friends, and their own experiences. And yet nothing is concrete. That too is shown even in the process of typing this essay; I questioned every sentence I wrote and I realized that it really is true that we know almost nothing. Almost everything is an opinion. Someone might think it is okay to hurt people because of all they’ve been through. Someone might think that they are perfect. And who knows, maybe I really am secretly adopted?