Thanks Ice, "Evaluate Your Life" day, should be an everyday--every moment according to Buddha--event, and, as Americans, we seem bound not to practice it, as our notions of ourselves are provided by external gauges. These gauges are calibrated to provide egoistic appraisals of ourselves--or "super egoistic" in Freudian terms. Plato called them the illusory "idols", shadows on the wall, Buddhists call them"maya", a social, not metaphysical concept.
All this prologue is simply to say there have always been societal barriers to self awareness, and the information age and the consumerist mentality are the new titans that would thwart that process. Most of us just don't do it from a perspective that would do us any good. Socrates, despite his use as a mouthpiece for Plato's thoughts in the "Dialogues", is known to have said very little. One things historians agree he said was that he didn't know what happened to people after they died. Another, not so clearly, has been normally translated as "The unexamined life is not worth living." That caution has reverbrated in one philosophy or saying throughout history. And we pay less attention to it today than ever.
Spanky
All this prologue is simply to say there have always been societal barriers to self awareness, and the information age and the consumerist mentality are the new titans that would thwart that process. Most of us just don't do it from a perspective that would do us any good. Socrates, despite his use as a mouthpiece for Plato's thoughts in the "Dialogues", is known to have said very little. One things historians agree he said was that he didn't know what happened to people after they died. Another, not so clearly, has been normally translated as "The unexamined life is not worth living." That caution has reverbrated in one philosophy or saying throughout history. And we pay less attention to it today than ever.
Spanky