One of life's secrets is learning to distinguish between fun and folly. Silliness is the spice of life. Fun can be a great. Genuine foolishness isn't. But of course, many of us have heard clever people refer in a silly way to something fun as mere foolishness. And of course, some real foolishness does pretend to be simple fun. But, just as obviously, not all folly masquerades as silliness or levity. Some genuine foolishness hides itself under the guise of ambition, or behind a total misunderstanding of what proper self esteem, or healthy self love, involves. Taken literally, foolishness, or folly, is a seriously detrimental phenomenon in our lives.
If we could rid the world of all foolishness, anger, and hatred, what a different place it would be! And think about this for a moment: If we could just cause all the folly in life to vanish, then it would, as a result, be extremely hard for any anger or hatred to get a foothold. There wouldn't be nearly as much to get angry about.
We praise wisdom and seek it. We need to equally criticize folly and shun it. And, by some strange turn of events, we don't even give much time at all to identifying or understanding it. The concept of foolishness has even become something of an old fashioned notion, like virtue. And that's ... foolish for sure.
What is foolish? What would be prudent, or wise, instead? We need to understand such things clearly, not merely for philosophical purposes, but for living a good life.
What have you done that you now think was foolish? Why do you think of it now as such? Don't you wish we talked about such things more? Isn't it foolish not to?
