War of the Words: is health important?
By Tariq Ghanzi, Contributor
While my debate partner, Joseph, makes good points; you do need your body for the entirety of your life and people can make whatever choices they wish with their bodies. However, he is wrong in saying that health is the most important part of life. Enjoyment of life is the most important part of living, seeing as happiness is something you can’t do when you’re dead. It might even be the best choice an individual can make with their own freewill.
Certainly, people should choose to be healthy if they can, but you should mostly choose the things that make you happy even if they are unhealthy. If you are a cinephile and you are happiest in your home theater with popcorn and litres of soda, who can judge you for your enjoyment? You’re not hurting anyone, and you are likely enjoying the creative work that someone spent a long time to make—so where’s the loss? My debate partner talks about spending time with friends, but doesn’t playing video games with your online buddies count? It’s popular and a lot of people like it, so why doesn’t that count for something as well? Maybe the idea of quality time shouldn’t just be time spent kicking a ball or running.
Besides, there are many ways for someone to derive pleasure during their free time. What about playing an instrument and enjoying music? Those things make people happy too and they don’t involve exercise. Those hobbies should be considered as important due to the happiness they brings. There are plenty of unhealthy musicians who lived to ripe old ages without caring much for their well being like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Those two have probably out lasted a fair few Olympians if we are being honest, so maybe health isn’t the golden ticket.
I think health isn’t particularly important seeing as you can be happy without having to focus too much on your moment-to-moment health. You can enjoy great food, you can enjoy other people’s creativity, you can even sit down and watch trained athletes compete and showcase their near inhuman skills. Why should people work so hard to be healthy when they can just enjoy how much there is to enjoy while you’re alive. It’s not like you’ll be alive forever regardless of how many laps you run anyways.
READ THE OTHER HALF OF THE DEBATE HERE!
