This is a translation of one of my old posts over at Freeblog where I used to blog in Hungarian. Let me live with the opportunity that I can share my opinion here in English, in the hope that I’ll get more interesting comments.
I was thinking a lot about the following question when I was a teenager: what if I had three wishes that I could use for anything? This is a very common question in tales, but I think it’s worth thinking about it with an adult mind, too. As a teenager I could think of the following wishes:
- Let there be no diseases on Earth
- Let there be no wars on Earth
This is the only two that I can remember, but I’m sure that there were more.
Interesting. What is interesting is not that I didn’t take it into consideration what my wishes would cause as a “side-effect”. For example, if there will be no sick people then doctors, nurses, those working at pharmacies, etc. will not have their jobs. Even more, it would probably have the undesired side-effect of accelerating the process of overpopulating the Earth as the average lifespan of people would become longer. The idea of not having any war would likely to have the same result, too. But as I said, it’s not this what is interesting. I would say that it’s even natural for a young man to think such a naive way. A teenager like what I was more than a decade ago can’t think ahead so that he would foresee the impact of these wishes. I didn’t have the experience nor the ethos that could have made me think a bit more complex.
What is more interesting, though, is that I think the same way even today. I would even add that people not work for money but for everybody’s happiness and prosperity. Yeah, one might say that I’m even more naive than I used to be. Sigh, might be true.
What else is interesting then? It’s the fact that whomever I asked about this question thought about him/herself at first. With the exception of some minority, of course. The first wish, in their opinion, would be “spent” for money. Then came a big house, challenging work, etc in the list. I’m sure that everybody could continue. Even myself …
Hence the question: is it only me who’s so naive that I think of others, too? I mean, I would rather think about others than myself. And you know, I’m a bit proud of this. My experience shows that whomever I talked to about this topic and shared my opinion after he had shared his, that person became a bit more silent. As if my opinion had made him think a bit more deeply about the topic and revised his opinion a bit so that he wouldn’t be so selfish. Of course, the reason I ask this question from people every now and then is NOT that I would like to abash them. On the contrary, I’m just looking for like-minded people.
I wish I could find more …
Tote
Tags: myself, three wishes
