I Do Whatever I Want with My Life

In our great-grandmothers’ day this phrase was occasionally heard from teenagers. Today some children start using it at a very early age, and young people (with their natural rebelliousness) use it more and more. But sadly it is also a phrase widely used by adults to justify each person doing whatever they please with their life, regardless of whether what they do is good or bad, unnatural or immoral; with no concern at all for the example they set, or for whether they harm themselves or one or more other people.

The crux of the matter is this: no one lives alone in this world. If I lived alone on an island, I could do whatever I wanted there without harming anyone. But human beings are social by nature, living in a society governed by natural laws that hold a great deal of common sense. And I am not talking about man-made laws, because in some countries those aren’t even enforced, and in others they have gone to the extreme of legalizing acts that go completely against nature.

But it doesn’t end there. Every person, who did not appear in the world out of nowhere, is surrounded by people directly connected to them: parents, spouses, children, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews… not to mention friends, bosses, employees and so on and so on.

That is why phrases like “I do whatever I want, whatever I feel like, or whatever my hormones tell me” run completely against living in a balanced and just society, where the true dignity of every human person can be respected.

Often, when we read the stories of people who have decided to stray from their path (through infidelity, divorce, abandoning their children, homosexuality, abortion, corruption and so on), we see how they have affected and caused suffering to those closest to them. And they often justify their mistakes by comparing themselves to the behavior of certain animals (as if they themselves had no brain or will). So they say they did what they did because they couldn’t control their instincts, because they felt enslaved by their passions and had to free themselves by giving free rein to their desires.

And yet it is paradoxical to see how these same people talk about taking care of their physical appearance (usually very important for those who live by power, hormones or passions), the result of exercise and diets that have required extreme self-denial and great willpower in order to look “beautiful.”

So I ask myself: do we have intelligence and will in our brains only to use them for certain things, like giving up some foods or putting up with exercise and/or surgeries that are not exactly pleasant, and not to govern our human actions, leaving them at the mercy of hormones, whims, desires and, very importantly, moral relativism (nothing is good, nothing is bad, everything is relative and depends on “the color of the glass you look through”)? And anyway, if so many people think and act this way, why shouldn’t I?

It is worth reflecting every time we say “I do whatever I want with my life,” because that phrase carries a long list of serious consequences for personal stability, family stability, social stability and, believe it or not, world stability. Or why do you think the world is the way it is?