The Vampire Dilemma

Hey there,

I use the “Pocket” extension in my firefox browser. It helps me to save articles that I find interesting. Apart from that, it also recommends good articles every day the moment I open firefox.

One of the articles that I recently stumbled upon was from Maria Popova's blog Brain Pickings. If you have not read her blog, please do it, right now. You will read about the other side of our hustling life and how it is important to stay close to nature and understand human emotions.

This particular article is about The Vampire's Dilemma.

The Vampire Problem: Illustrating the Paradox of Transformative Experience

In short, it says that if you were given a choice to become a Vampire without feeling any pain or causing any trouble to others and then you could live forever, will you agree or stay human?

The thing is, you can never make an informed decision here because you have never experienced what being a vampire feels like. You can only imagine. Only once you have actually transformed into one will you know how it’s like.

"When faced with the most transformative experiences, we are ill-equipped to even begin to imagine the nature and magnitude of the transformation — but we must, again and again, challenge ourselves to transcend this elemental failure of the imagination if we are to reap the rewards of any transformative experience."

“Many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.”

I relate this article to the feeling of self-doubt we all face while trying out something new especially if it’s on a large scale. You might be planning to start a new job, or a company, or even preparing for an exam. But the feeling of "Is it worth it?" and "Will I be able to make it" is always there. The truth is, you'll never know its worth until you have achieved it. Self-doubt will always be there. You can never weigh the pros and cons of undergoing a transformative change in your life accurately. So, if you really want it, just do it without worrying about the outcome.

Happy reading...