“Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.” – Seneca
First off, let me start with a little disclaimer. The things I’m about to say may offend some, but this is just my opinions and my recent reflections in life. I will not say that I totally abhor convenience, money, and technology, but to rather point out how absurd our reliance to conveniences, the lengths we go through for money and on how most men abandon their virtues for the pursuit of conveniences and money. I totally enjoy Netflix and writing in the wonderful world of WordPress as a matter of fact and I totally needed money to fund my house renovation project, so please don’t hate =)
From high-speed internet to a device that folds our laundry for us, it’s almost on a daily basis that someone breaks new grounds in terms of our technological advancements. Somewhere in someone’s basement, somebody is tinkering on something to revolutionize our way of living. To make it easier, more convenient… Or is it?
A week ago, I witness a very heated exchange between my younger brother and our youngest sister. I watched how our sister berated my brother about his wife and children just because he owes her… money.
My brother borrowed money from our sister to fund his small motorcycle garage because it was more convenient than getting a loan from somebody else. As the business grew so as their resentment toward each other, with our sister often clashing my brother’s wife.
The incident forced me to reevaluate a man’s role in a world of convenience. The age where a man’s gift is looked down on and only called upon and appreciated when needed. Even men forsake their own manhood and virtues because it’s no longer convenient.
The age of convenience favors those who can afford it and to afford the world of conveniences you need to make money, lots of money. The more money you have the more conveniences you can afford and the more conveniences you can afford gives you more time to make more money. But convenience always comes with a price…
The age of convenience makes very little room for a man and his gifts. His strength, his resilience, his courage and his other gifts are no longer needed in this age when we have the technology for just about anything. Even to the conception and raising of a child, a woman can simply get a donor and make more money to make it more convenient. A life of a man is expendable (sigh)…
The world has become so convenient that even a man’s true virtues are no longer required, making most men abandon the pursuit of their own virtue. But what if… one day, the world loses all of its conveniences. What if there’s no hot water, no high-speed internet, no fast food restaurants, no roofs above our head? What if money has lost its value? What if all we’ve gotten good at is earning money and loaning ourselves to afford those fancy gadgets and other latest conveniences, technology has to offer? What if the world needed men, our strength, our courage, our willingness to do the dirty work?
I guess what I’m trying to convey in this post is that people, especially men shouldn’t abandon their virtues just because it is no longer convenient. Do it not for the world but to themselves and by that, in my opinion, would make the world a better place, not with its conveniences. How I wish it would be convenient for me to earn money just by writing, but the reality is I’m not a great writer yet still I write. I write for wisdom, for that connection I share with those who read my writing, I write for something that I could be proud of.
