Instigator / Pro

seldiora

1417

rating

158

debates

32.59%

won

Topic

#2330

If you could easily modify your life to become perfect, you should not do it

Status

Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics

Winner

After 2 votes and with 2 points ahead, the winner is...

seldiora

Tags

Philosophy

Parameters

Publication date: 09.09.2020 03:24PM
Last updated date: 09.24.2020 04:26AM
Type: Standard
Number of rounds: 3
Time for argument: Two days
Max argument characters: 5,000
Voting period: Two weeks
Point system: Winner selection
Voting system: Open

Contender / Con

Isuckatdebating

1480

rating

debates

0.0%

won

Description

Assume you are granted limitless power with regards to your own life, and can make your life perfect, without errors, as good as can possibly be, while using very little effort ("with a single click", as I can I BB would say)

Round 1

seldiora

09.10.2020 02:12AM

Pro

My argument is simple. A perfect life is boring. There is nowhere else to go. You lose all motivation for life, and you have no goals. Rich people often purport that they have everything they had ever wanted, a wife, a solid job, a good home, kids. They can easily get a vacation, a fancy car, even donate to charity to solve problems, but they feel everything is too easy. If your life was perfect, then it would ironically be imperfect. Because life itself is filled with imperfection and a crucial part that we adapt to and manage around. Human is about innovation to curb problems and as such easily managing to modify your life to perfection would be akin to playing god and absurd in the end.

And remember, perfect for you does not mean perfect for everyone. If you were to hate your nearby neighbor, who was very talkative and blabbering on about nothing, then a perfect life might include him being quiet. By modifying his genes, or taping his mouth, or some other means, you make him less likely to talk. But you are restricting his freedom of speech, his freedom of life. By trying to make a perfect life for yourself, you arguably make things tough for other people. Remember that, in modern day, for people to enjoy vastly, a lot of times other people have to suffer, because someone has to give the something that makes the person's life incredibly amazing. Lower class give services to higher classes. That's the way life has been. In order for this to work, you would have to balanced EVERYONE's lives. But most humans are selfish and greedy. Given infinite power to make their life "as good as possible", it's hard to say if the corruption wouldn't get to them, and make everyone else suffer merely to make their lives perfect.

In our lives we individually surrender control, in order to learn more about the world. Though we seem fragile, our minds are more innovative and powerful than we think. We learn through our mistakes and the imperfections of our life. They are humbling and worth going through. It's like the Incredibles said, "if everyone's super, nobody is", indeed, if every moment of your life had no flaws, you would begin to stop appreciating it, as it would be very common to you. But without appreciation, wouldn't you ironically end up with a worse life than before?

Isuckatdebating

09.10.2020 02:39AM

Con

A perfect life doesn’t have to be boring. Life will give you so many things that you can learn, you just have to take advantage of them. A perfect life doesn’t have to contain you knowing everything, what a perfect life can do is guarantee you enough time and money to do whatever you please. So as an example that from me, I am trying to learn to debate, if I could have all the time in the world I would be much happier and would achieve my goal much quicker. A perfect life is not boring unless you make it boring.

You don’t have to take away from people to have a perfect life, instead of duct taping your neighbor’s mouth, why don’t you move to a place where you don’t have neighbors, if you have a butler, pay them a ton of money (assuming you have as much money as you want). Why take away from people in your perfect life instead of giving to them?

Why does a perfect life have to mean that we make no mistakes? If we were to make no mistakes it might not as well be a perfect life. Mistakes are one of the most important parts of our daily lives because we can learn from them. In a perfect life there is no point in taking away mistakes. Mistakes are a good thing so why would we have them taken from our perfect life?

Round 2

seldiora

09.10.2020 02:53AM

Pro

Con argues that perfect doesn't mean boring, but gives no support for this. Consider a finished puzzle. You are done. You have no more left to do. If someone gave you a finished puzzle, the only thing you can do is to mess it up and restart. Similarly, if your life goals are all accomplished, then your life is perfect and there is nothing else, no more stimulation, and hence, you would be bored. Con brings up giving himself more time to debate, but firstly, having infinite time to improve oneself can lead to procrastination and gives excuses to be lazy, as the argument "I can always do it tomorrow" would always be true, and hence you would likely stagnate and never improve. Keep in mind that your average human wants to take shortcuts and find and easy way through, that's why we think so many people are addicted to our phones and computers, as we are sucked into what we believe is "perfect" for us, but takes away from social interaction and actual life. If your life was so perfect, then you would likely be less productive to society as a whole. And wouldn't making yourself the best debater in the world instantly fix your problem of wanting to debate? (This, ironically negates the need for you to improve, which proves my point)

Now con brings up the possibility to help others improve their life as part of your perfect life. However, it requires a very generous person and being able to judge what is right and what is wrong. Most people are selfish and don't care about 7 billion people asking to have a perfect life. It would simply take too much of a mindset to be able to gather everyone together and mutually agree on a perfect society; with 7 billion different view points, a perfect world is far more impossible than the perfect life for yourself.

Finally, con admits that mistakes are crucial for life. That then brings a slippery slope, which mistakes are actually necessary and which are not? This becomes incredibly vague to define and hard to say which one you're willing to accept and which one you think would be merely a plot device to make your life more realistic. Consider hacking a game, you can easily defeat it and you can make it very easy. But almost all cases you should not do this; a game is meant to be fun and challenging. Being able to perfectly do everything easily means the game just becomes a relaxing breeze that loses its purpose and its challenge. How can con know for sure that the frustration caused by a small mistake won't deteriorate the "perfect life"? Con's case contradicts itself.

Isuckatdebating

09.10.2020 03:31AM

Con

A perfect life doesn’t mean knowing everything. I think a perfect life would be an entryway into learning many new things, this is what suggests that a perfect life wouldn’t be boring. Though the excuse “I can do it tomorrow” would always be viable, you wouldn’t use it. In a perfect life if you started to get bored you would try to think of things that would make it less boring, if you kept using the same excuse eventually you would realize that that excuse is what is making your life boring. My problem isn’t that I don’t know how to debate, it’s that I don’t have enough time to learn how. In my perfect life I wouldn’t want to be the best debater in the world, it’s about the journey not the destination.

Being generous isn’t a problem if you have infinite of whatever you need. If someone asks for an apple and you have infinite apples why would you say no to them?

You wouldn’t be the person deciding which mistakes are crucial or not, the perfect life that would come to you would already know that without you having to think about it. Your perfect life would know if a mistake will stop you from having a perfect life since after all it is perfect. The analogy pro used has nothing to do with the conversation and seems to just be filler text. I would agree that if you were able to complete the game in a breeze that wouldn’t make the game fun, but in a perfect life you wouldn’t want to do that.

Round 3

seldiora

09.10.2020 04:13AM

Pro

in the end, con's argument only works in hindsight and with extremely wise people who are very self-introspective. Consider the richest men in the world, they have everything they ever wanted but they are just not grateful, and they feel their life is not perfect, despite being able to manipulate the world with vast power and influence (as they are trusted in their fields of industry and are CEO's, businessmen, etc). In the end, being merely satisfied with the life you are already given is good enough for the vast majority of people. There is little need to change your life to become absolutely perfect and as good as possible. Remember Buddhist monks who transcend enlightenment merely by being calm and meditating. Everyone can do this, if they let go of material desires and wants. But with this limitless power, you contradict the pure nature of what truly makes people happy, and tempt even the most selfless person to become corrupt should they use this power. Con advocates that he wants merely a "little more", but how can we be so sure people won't be greedy and keep striving to use their omnipotent level of power to achieve pure perfection, only to realize, that ironically, no change just might be "perfection" already?

Vote for pro.

Isuckatdebating

09.10.2020 04:26AM

Con

Perfection, can mean different things to different people. Which means perfection can be anything you make it out to be, so if you stride to make perfection not boring you can achieve that with ease.

Vote for Con.

seldiora

09.10.2020 04:21AM

-->

@Intelligence_06

How can you? Greedy and selfish humans would not want to change their bad traits, you would have to assume the user is good and wise in order to properly use this limitless power

Intelligence_06

09.10.2020 02:42AM

Guess someone accepted this already. That said, I can win with the CON stance on this resolution, easily.

Intelligence_06

09.10.2020 01:02AM

3 new users in just 2 days? Looks like this site is returnin' to boomin'.

Barney

09.23.2020 06:31AM

Criterion

Pro

Tie

Con

Points

Winner

1 point(s)

Reason:

First I should state that I wouldn't hesitate to press the button.

Pro does a very good job pointing out the damage to other people's freedoms, which the very risk of ethically means someone ought to not press the button. Con does ok defending this, but he just misses the mark a little by insisting on the errors as part of perfection (they certainly help build toward improvement, but are not perfection in themselves). At the same time, I like what con says would be perfection to him; it is however not the perfection I would assume the average person would seek.

I can't get the impacts to other people out of my head... Even as someone who sides with pro, I realize that my perfect life would include a certain perfect someone; and the perfection would not allow them to ever voice if they would rather be somewhere else with someone else. So I would do it, but I should not.

MisterChris

09.20.2020 02:20AM

Criterion

Pro

Tie

Con

Points

Winner

1 point(s)

Reason:

Both PRO and CON seem to agree on the framing that "life is about the journey, not the destination." PRO argues that this means having a "perfect life" is like being at the destination with nowhere to go, and CON says there is plenty to go for from there. My question as a voter is: what? What is there to go for? If we are defining "perfect" as "having everything you want in life fulfilled," I really don't understand how CON can argue there is any more to gain from it in terms of taking a "journey."

What CON really needed to do was reframe the entire discussion and argue that "having nowhere to go is not a bad thing. In fact, it's exactly where we should aspire to be."

As for the arguments regarding other people, as a voter I buy that a creating a "perfect life" could entail changing other people who are actively involved in that life. What I don't buy is the idea that creating a perfect life for yourself means that you are able to affect the world outside of your social circle. As for this argument, I am also giving this to PRO, because while I do like the argument CON presents (that people can use their ability to help those in their immediate circle) I find that using it to alter the life of someone else in a distasteful way to be all too likely of a scenario.