i want to talk about those again. once i told someone an experience. here's what i sent to him.



once a university teacher told us that we should stop being lazy and irresponsible and feel ashamed and motivated as the students from some worldwide first-class universities study to 3 a.m. everyday. and he told us that all depressed people are irresponsible and we should be away from them if we couldn't avoid being influenced by them. the best treatment for depression is to work harder to avoid the mood. and he said that the culture of our university is an unhealthy tendency compared to that of high schools. i told one of my friends that i felt really angry and ashamed because of his words. the friend told me that it's obvious that the teacher was right. i asked him if he was studying. he said that he wasn't but he actually regretted to say that as it was corrupting the ethos.

i really don't know what to say. i really don't want to see people like them again. at least, at least you don't say that high schools are good. after all that's the main reason why people can't motivate themselves to study till three in the morning in the university.

of course if universities work like high schools now, the students will probably learn more. i mean, why don't you pursue some organization to contol everyone in the society to work hard, considering the truth which i even agree that basically all modern people are lazy, fragile and spoiled.



how do you feel the last paragraph? sometimes we assume that people are rational enough that a free man will make decisions that are at least good for himself. But if we demand more from this "good", can we say that man always makes decisions that best suit (at least) his own interests? Obviously not. We are lazy when we study, eat unhealthy foods, and are addicted to or at least dependent on our phones. And we don't usually try to make ourselves stronger by turning everything we encounter into motivation. But we also cannot seek an external constraint that ruthlessly maximizes our long-term interests. I think that sometimes our will should trump our interests. Thinking about whether you will regret it later seems to be an optional criterion. We often don't regret that we didn't maximize our interests in the first place, we only blame ourselves for being too irresponsible in the past. This is probably why we often use the word "responsible" instead of "do our best" when we talk about students. We (ideally) think that students should meet the basic requirements of society, and then, in the future, don't regret too much not trying hard enough in the first place. We sometimes say "you have to work hard enough" instead of "you have to do your best", which may be due to similar thinking.