Have you ever been faced with a choice between personal happiness and duty?
Duty offers it’s satisfactions of one kind—one maintains or builds ties with others in one’s community. It could be with the wider community (duty to country) or with family (duty to parents or to children). One may not like one’s parents (or country) but one still serves them for the joys and sense of goodness or for fulfilling one’s sense of obligation and guilt. In any case, duty offers much reward, although it can be rather diffuse, and one might resent doing one’s duty.
Personal happiness—well, that’s pretty much it. It’s personal. Selfish. It might also provide a benefit to others, but primarily the benefit is to you. It might have a very large benefit, such as the opportunity to live with your soulmate.
Sometimes these goods are a zero-sum situation. You can only have one or the other. You can’t have both. You can run off with your soulmate and explore the world, or you can stay home and care for your very sick parents since there is no one else to do it.
Have you ever been faced with such a choice? What was the situation? How did you decide? If you haven’t been in such a situation, what would you do if faced with a choice between taking care of your family (sick parents or children) and spending the rest of your life with your soulmate. You can’t have both. It’s not a matter of waiting. It’s now or never.
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18 Answers
Well, pretty much every morning when I do my 20+ mile commute up Mopac only to spend 8+ hours in my fabric covered cell doing battle with code rather than hanging out in my comfortable home and spending my time honing my skills in the various arcane arts that give me pleasure.
I’m a mother and step mother to a boy with Autism. Before I had kids of my own, I moved back home, half way around the world, gave up everything for 8 months to help nurse my mother and help my father while she went through chemo. Yeah. I do the duty thing every time.
Yeah, I always choose duty over personal happiness.
Until the last time, and I pushed myself too far. I broke down emotionally, and it has taken almost 2 years to begin to recover. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not good to anyone if I don’t take care of myself. I won’t be doing that again.
When I was younger, I found a lot of my personal happiness came from professional success, and my home life did suffer for that. My priorities are different now.
I choose duty every time.
When no choice needs to be made, I try and do things every day to enrich that whole “personal happiness” thing. But when something comes up among the ones I love, they come first for me—always.
Years and years ago I wanted so bad to quit a job but decided to stay in hell only so I can provide a brother his weekly schooling allowance. Zero regrets.
I’m going through choices like this now. I have tried to do a little bit of compromise (which I realize was not really permissable in your question) but mostly I have done the obligation hoping the people around me will be understanding, and sacrificing my personal happiness. It has sucked, but I guess it was the right thing. Not even sure, still in the midst of it.
I consider parenthood a “duty”. The rewards are amazing….but the sacrifices are great. 18–22 years of my life will be dedicated to raising these wonderful boys but there haws been a lot of things, places and activities that have been shelved to execute my duty to raise these young men to the best of my ability. I wouldn’t have it any other way….sigh.
Have I? Yes.
Will I tell you about it? No.
It’s ironic that you should post this question at this time. My daughter has just told me that my great grandchild, named Jesse, has just been diagnosed with double pneumonia.
I also have learned that my grandchild(mother of Jesse) has been smoking pot in her apartment with Jesse, who is three years old.
This is a perfect example of doing what is right or wrong, compared to personal pleasure.
Needless to say, her grandfather is going to take some action, in defense of little Jesse.
I choose duty as well. Helping other people brings me satisfaction and happiness in other ways though, so it’s not a total loss for my happiness.
I have mostly chosen personal happiness over duty. Just my nature. But my happiness or choices have not affected others directly. But, if I know that my choice will affect others, I will always choose duty. Like 8 yrs ago, my dog had 4 pups. At the time, I couldn’t find suitable homes for them, so rather than putting them to sleep or something like that, I decided to keep them. I thought it was my moral duty to keep them and although it has been very very difficult, I have no regrets whatsoever.
I haven’t been put in a situation in life like that before well, I have, but it was something stupid but I would choose duty over personal any time. All that matters to me is that everyone I love are safe and sound, and I’ll deal with myself later.
No, I’ve got a good sense of duty and it seems to generally line up with my demand of happiness. Perhaps, I disregard duty that I don’t consider important according to my own standards (I don’t hold blood ties above others, I don’t hold any one country as mine, I find most concepts of duty to be self-serving, etc.) which allows for this kind of parallelism.
I spent 5½ years in the Navy so I made that type of choice so many times that I don’t even notice when I do it any more :/
Happiness is fleeting as are looks and youth.
Duty out of sensible care, love and responsibility is enough to make me know I’m as permanently happy as a person can expect be.
However happiness for the sake of pure immediate gratification is what seems to be societies choice. Even though most rationalize their choice has value; it is questionable and usually quite self serving. With little regard for others.
It depends on the nature of the duty (who is it to? how long will it last?), and how much or little it affects my mental well being (is this just an inconvenience or is it going to make me want to off myself?). Temporary sacrifice in the name of the greater good or to help a loved one is just a part of life, I think. I’ve done that quite a bit. In some cases for a very long time, too. I suppose most everyone has.
But lifelong devotion to duty at the expense of my mental health? Not gonna’ happen. Unless you count parenthood, but that brings me happiness, too.
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