kevinleemelife happens. how will you adapt?

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt

When you ask someone for their opinion on the purpose of human life, you often receive generic responses such as “To live, laugh, and love,” or to “experience the world.” While those answers may be true, I believe in a simpler answer of the two S’s. Survival and Self- Improvement.

Ever since the beginning of mankind, humans have retained the natural instinct to survive. And to do so, humans had to self-improve, whether it be through the creation of tools, weapons, fire, etc… Without one there isn’t the other, and to this present year, if you think very carefully about every action a human being makes in this world, it all still ties back to surviving or self-improving in order to survive.

And yet, humans have the uncanny ability to never realize the importance of survival and self-improvement until it’s too late. Students procrastinate until the night before a test, only to realize that the only chance of survival is an attempt at self-improving  through studying all night. Individuals facing health risks through obesity realize that they should have been self-improving their eating habits all along. And our civilization pollutes and exploits the land, until one day, we’ve realized that we’ve depleted all the natural resources and destroyed our world to a point where self-improvement no longer is an option.