This I Believe

Laine Greaves-Smith

November 16, 2006

Eng 1

This I Believe…Conflicts are Essential to a Happy Life

I Believe that conflicts create a life worth living. Many people dream of a life with no conflicts or problems, but I think that a life like that wouldn’t be worth living. On a warm night this past summerI lay awake on my bed with the window open. I heard two people down the street having a rather loud argument on their back porch. I began to wonder why couldn’t there be a world without problems like the one they were trying to work out. Why couldn’t there be a perfect world were everybody got along with one another? I wanted to know why life had so many conflicts between people and why the world had so many problems. And then it struck me. If there weren’t, my very existence would be Incredibly Dull.

Conflict is what makes life exiting, you never know whats going to happen. If everything went perfectly and according to plan nothing interesting would happen. Everything would be so predictable I believe it would drive everybody crazy. It is natural human instinct to desire something, anything out of the ordinary. If everybody is to act the same and be the same, there should, in theory, be no conflicts. But through socialism its been shown that humans need differences between each other; no one likes being the same as everyone else. It is through these differences that conflict is created. There is a sense of competition instilled in all of us that must be fed. If there is not competition, life becomes bleak and lacks a driving purpose. With no competition there is no conflict. Living a life like this would bore me out of my mind. I found it ironic that I had just realized the human need for conflict as I lay in my bed with absolutely nothing to worry about. I lay there without a care in the world and began to grow more and more impatient with my inability to sleep, a conflict. I should have had nothing to worry about and my human instinct was to find a fault with my lack of conflict.