the way of life?

Cool . . . a blast from the past . . .

What does rality mean?

maybe they meant Realty, nothing sums up your life like a 30 year mortgage

There was a great Doonesbury cartoon showing a kid watching the teevee and seeing an ad for condoms, which confuses him, so he asks his dad what sex has to do with real estate . . .

Everything, son . . . why?

To be optimistic or pessimistic are not choices, but are natural to people and to their individual characters... The object of moral philosophy imo is to question these presumptive outlooks, and fate -which is an old word for determinism... I think Beowulf said it well, and I paraphrase, that a person with courage might change their fate... Yet, courage is a virtue, and what virtue stands alone???

As a person cultivates their virtues so they feed their wisdom and make their own fate with the material given to each of us with life... And with wisdom you can realize the limits of reality, and understand how little we can know of reality, and can see realism as only a form of idealism... All of our ideas and forms are only an analogy of truth, an image seen as through a glass darkly...

In the reality we have as a sea we swim in there is many a brilliant fish and none so fast they cannot slip our grip without will, and it is wisdom to know this is as good as it gets, and the nets we set do not fix the fish so much as kills their essential element as their lives slip away... Just as the proper study of man is man, the study of life is life that we do not know more the more we kill.. So reject all preconceptions of life as realism, pessimism, and optimism are... It is not optimism that makes for happiness because it is unfounded, but honor which is founded on the sense that we are one people, one humanity having equal claim in life...

With life, what you have is all you have, and how you live what you have will determine whether you will live happily; and it is your choice...Life is all meaning, so do not expect your meaning to linger like stink on your corpse... Enjoy or suffer what you have while you have it, expecting nothing more, and taking nothing less... The rich and the poor, the weak and the strong all pay for their lives with their lives and in this we are all the same -for to know life is to fear death, but wisdom is to fear dishonor as honor is worth more than life because it is the making of life and of happiness... Honor knows and wisdom knows and virtue knows the value and meaning of a certain word as common as babble in every mouth: ENOUGH...

hahaha i meant reality, sorry about that my "e" on the keyboard is a little broken

and to fido, i definitely agree. well put

I personally strive for the realist position yet this might sound a tad pessimistic and perhaps shadow the realist by saying that it is incredibly difficult to maintain a realist position even though it should be the more natural one.

Humans have this incessant need to fantasize but not only that we tend to exaggerate beliefs beyond their actual reality. This isn't to say that knowledge is always questioned or suspect. But it is trustworthy yet we will abandon it completely if it contradicts what we personally want.

Id rather abandon being optimistic because it borderlines on wishful or hopeful thinking and wants things to be different than how they really are. Although it is useful in times of distress or danger, but beyond that it only makes one haughty and unrealistic.

The pessimist is typically annoying because there is never an escape like the optimist can readily see. For the realist there is always an option, it might not be the best or most desired but if you are creative enough, a solution will present itself. That perhaps may sound like an optimist tone but it is a realist standpoint. It's just a matter of how you want to handle the information with the problem that is presenting itself.

I would say if these three were on a spectrum the realist would be in the middle where one should always be on all cases because generally there are good and bad to both sides of every issue. It's a matter of which one you want to accept as having fewer or more where the choice tends to sit.

Ah well, it happens to all of us . . . it's all about sex and real estate, everything else is just a distraction.

I always thought that condoms included **** like horseradish and ketchup

TMI, Dude . . . there are things about your private life i never wanted to know . . .

My father always called condoms: conundrums.... I guess it would be something of an intelligence test for a sperm cell... It is too bad that those who most seem to need them never learn to put them on, and that would include the whole republican party...It isn't that they haven't figured out how to screw the people without actually having sex, but that when they are done, they actually breed with each other, daring God in heaven to blast their sinful asses with a bolt out of the blue... I'd like to have his job for a day or two... There would be so many smoking corpses the world would smell like a gigantic barbecue...