Elementary my dear.

Life flows ever onwards, do we drift or go with or against it.

One cannot avoid decisions, even to simply not make a decision is in itself a decision. In the end you are responsible for your plight or wellbeing. Society has changed, or has it? Poverty drove our relationships in the Victorian era, and today societal energy drives our relationships, but our relationships have not changed. We are still human animals. As a genus we are like other animals we strive for continuation of our species, not as individuals but unknowingly together. Life is not like a river, it flows in many directions and there are many dead ends. If we drift we can find ourselves in one of these dead ends and we will have a feeling of something being wrong without knowing what it is. There is no way forward, and we sink to the bottom. There is an alternative of course but that requires thought, decision making, and swimming against the flow. In the end it is survival of the fittest, a unrewarding motivation for the unthinking.

The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake is a dead end, if for no other reason than a satisfied need not longer motivates, and an unrelenting pursuit of that fading pleasure will lead to physical or mental sickness. We need to see ourselves for what we are, animals that make intellectual choices. Choices that are intellectual need training for, they cannot come from nowhere. In a way rather like computers, they used to say rubbish in, rubbish out. We have to ask ourselves what our objective is, and will our desired way forward achieve our objective. Our objective is rather like a diamond, it has many facets and is extremely valuable, and is three dimensional. The short term can drive the long term but the end cannot be ignored.