Old Habits Die Hard
Dedication is a remarkable thing. For those who possess it, any other way of life is entirely foreign to them. The concept of procrastination utterly alien. But for those who lack it, life is an interminable series of flickering deadlines and pointless wastes of time. It's interesting, because both people exist solely in the spaces between completing a task and starting the next one, but in a much different way. The ant is the one who cannot stand to be idle and so focusses on the completion of a job for the sole purpose of starting the next, whereas the grasshopper cannot stand to be industrious, and so whiles away his time in the middle of a task, dreading both the inevitable conclusion and the presence of a new task to replace the old.
Society teaches us to aspire to the ant's diligence while shunning the negligence of the grasshopper. Indeed, the stakes of this ideological struggle is life and death itself, which we see when the noble ant, who has spent all summer amassing a great deal of food, is prepared for the barren wastes of winter. The grasshopper, on the other hand, who spent his time on anything but the job at hand, finds himself in a dire situation. An interesting method of testing which side of the fence one's parents are on is to see whether the version of the story they use ends in the ant generously sharing his hard-earned food, or the frozen corpse of the starved grasshopper.
If it is the latter, I tend to think that the ant has blood on his hands, since the grasshopper was both his friend and his neighbour. Regardless of one's moral convictions, letting one's neighbour starve is still bad karma. Another, perhaps more pressing, concern is the solitary life led by the ant. Where is his colony? Where is his fealty to his Queen? How is he able to withhold such a wealth of food and not share it with his brother-drones? Why has his neighbour, the grasshopper, not turned him in to the proper authorities and quietly seized his assets on the side?
And there we see the true downfall of dedication. Sooner or later, you wind up more dedicated to the job than your friends, and then your friends rat you out to the ant-SS and then eat all your food.
Society teaches us to aspire to the ant's diligence while shunning the negligence of the grasshopper. Indeed, the stakes of this ideological struggle is life and death itself, which we see when the noble ant, who has spent all summer amassing a great deal of food, is prepared for the barren wastes of winter. The grasshopper, on the other hand, who spent his time on anything but the job at hand, finds himself in a dire situation. An interesting method of testing which side of the fence one's parents are on is to see whether the version of the story they use ends in the ant generously sharing his hard-earned food, or the frozen corpse of the starved grasshopper.
If it is the latter, I tend to think that the ant has blood on his hands, since the grasshopper was both his friend and his neighbour. Regardless of one's moral convictions, letting one's neighbour starve is still bad karma. Another, perhaps more pressing, concern is the solitary life led by the ant. Where is his colony? Where is his fealty to his Queen? How is he able to withhold such a wealth of food and not share it with his brother-drones? Why has his neighbour, the grasshopper, not turned him in to the proper authorities and quietly seized his assets on the side?
And there we see the true downfall of dedication. Sooner or later, you wind up more dedicated to the job than your friends, and then your friends rat you out to the ant-SS and then eat all your food.