1984- George Orwell

I'm currently reading 1984, by George Orwell. Where to start. I don't want this whole post to just be a summary, so I wont even start, because when I get going on the summaries, I don't stop. George Orwell addresses many issues in this book, but one that I found the most intriguing is the fact that things might not have been better before Big Brother took over and made everyone communist. Of course, when you first glance at it, obviously life was better before, but who knows. The standard of living might be lower for England, but England. Maybe if Big Brother had complete control over everything, the overall standard of living would be raised from where it was. Yes, having insight into people's minds is not a good thing for the general population, and being able to see what goes on everywhere, even in people's personal homes means that certain people no privacy whatsoever, which no one can think is a good idea. Still, if you don't know how it was like before, how can you say that the conditions today are worse.

I have been thinking a lot about different people's lives. When someone says that they have a good life, or a bad life, what does that mean? Can anyone really compare their life to someone else's? In sports, there are people who run a lot, so they build up their endurance. I think life is like that too. If you live a hard life and bad things happen to you more often then good, you build up your endurance for bad things, so they don't have much of an effect. I'm not saying that when bad things happen to people it has no effect on them and they can just shrug it off, but someone who has been living the dream and is suddenly broke will feel it a lot worse then someone who lives a life of a broke person all the time.

To us, the life of an animal seems extremely boring. To that animal, say an ant, everything is just more interesting. I think that people who live a hard life compared to us have a better endurance for things like that. Good things are better for them then they are for us, but they get fewer of them, bad things are worse for us, because we don't know how to handle them.

Yes, some people have hard lives, you could even say bad lives, but they have a stronger defense against bad things then people with easy, good lives. It might not even out perfectly, but I think the difference isn't as great as it is made out to be.