I’m young and ambitious; I want to save the world, be a psychiatrist, be president, marry a beautiful wife, and have hundreds of offspring. Right now, I am on the path to finishing high school and going to college, and I know my future is filled with decisions. My happiness in the future will be defined by the decisions I make now, an existential anguish that has come to determine how I live. The most important decision I believe one can go a lifetime without making but will change a life if made is the decision to allow love or curiosity to rule one’s life.
Human existence has been defined by two concepts: love and curiosity. All art is based on love; even the gothic styles that invoke fear and sorrow are based on fear of God and desire for his love. Love is the fundamental emotion of the human soul, the keystone in human interaction and, in my opinion, one of our raisons d’etre. Life is a quest for love: love of family, love of friends, love of children and love of a mate. People are defined by whom, how, what, and why they love.
Curiosity, the other character of human advancement, is the term for human quest for knowledge. We, being higher forms of life than, say, earthworms, want to know what different ways of life are like. We work through school to get to college, which is where we will learn about things that interest us and learn how to work in our future jobs, in a quest to get money in order to satisfy our curiosities about what it’s like to live a middle-class life. Thus, our existence is defined by love and curiosity, and when these two come into conflict, we must make decisions that could create or destroy the rest of our lives.
Life is unpredictable. As Sartre claimed, we are “condemned to be free”, and are responsible for the decisions that are the hardest for us to make. The best example I can think of for this conflict is the decision between following a love to college or going to another, better college. I do not know what my situation will be in love when I graduate and leave high school, but if I am in love and if I have the opportunity to go far away to a college that many dream about but never achieve, that decision is what will tear me apart inside, and what will determine how happy I am with the rest of my life. I don’t know how I would answer it; something tells me I’d lean toward my education, hoping that things work out for the best, but one never really knows how he’ll think in the future. All I do know is that even though love and curiosity are incredibly powerful motivations in human life, there is one feeling that, if I made the wrong decision, would haunt me forever: regret.