<p>First off, I know these essays are pretty terrible, but lol. I’m bad at writing quickly. If there are grammar mistakes, it’s because I didn’t get a change to proofread. </p>
<p>Prompt 1: can success be disastrous? </p>
<p>The sweet smell of success…right? Although at first glance, success seems wholly psotive after all, who doesn’t want to succeed in their endeavors? - often, what people seek is not what they get in the end. The success people believe they will have often results in situations much worse than they expected. This theme is demonstrated in many works of literature, including the fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. </p>
<pre><code>The first book of A Song of Ice And Fire, Game of Thrones, begins with the Stark family featured as the main characters. House Stark is a greathouse and a family made up of Ned Stark, his wife, and his four children. Unlike many of the royal houses of Westeros, the universe the books take place in, the Starks posess a uniquely healthy family life. Ned is a loving father to his children and he and his wife have a very good relationship in spite of their relatively unimportant social standing among the royal houses, as the goal of most houses is to achieve royal standing and royal favor from the Capital. However, Ned and his family are happy governing the rural and frozen north because even if they have a relatively simple life in comparison to their neighbors, it is a peaceful life.
As the novel progresses, Ned’s social standing begins to change. He is visited by the king, who invites him to become the Hand of the King, an extremely prestigious and important position, as Ned would then be the direct advisor to the ruler of the entire realm. Many of the other greathouses express envy at Ned’s heightened position, going from ruler of the rural and unimportant north to basically the second-in-command of the entire kingdom. In other words, he has achieved success. Still, his wife warns him against accepting the offer, because she sees their current life as safe and she knows that once Ned has achieved such a famous and heightened position, both his life and his family’s life will be in danger. Ned ignores her, thinking that the change will be good for the family. There will be more money, for one, and he will be able to secure high noble positions for all his children. By taking the role, the family will be in good standing in the eyes of the king, who is the ultimate ruler.
However, once Ned travels to the capital along with two of his children, his perspective changes. Simply by being the hand of the king, Ned is now the enemy of many of the major players in the capital. When the king dies in a accident, Ned is suddenly not safe anymore, and his previous success turns into life-or-death situation. He is thrown into jail and eventually executed. One of his children remains a prisoner in the capital; the other becomes a runaway outlaw and must disguise herself among criminals. Even his family, still back in northern Westeros, is now politically blacklisted, which is truly deadly in the mideival-esque world they live in. Therefore, in hindsight, it is obvious that Ned would have been better off refusing the position of hand of the king in order to continue his safe, if less successful, life.
Oftentimes the situations people expect do not actually play out and success is never a guarantee against negatively changing circumstances. There are unexpected consequences in every situation. The guise of success can cloud one’s judgement as it did to Ned, and although success may look sweet from far away, when one truly reaches it, it could be disastrously negative.
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<p>Prompt 2: Is change that makes our lives easier always positive? </p>
<p>Although at first glance, changes that make people’s lives easier seem to be wholly positive, upon a closer look, modernization that first appears to help can often result in laziness and lethargy, which is overwhemingly negative to the human race. This lesson is shown quite promienently in the film Wall-E, which discusses the harms of modernization that can lead to laziness. </p>
<pre><code>In the Pixar film Wall-E, the main character is a robot and the sole inhabitator of a ruined, futuristic Earth. Howver, what is unique about WALL-E is that this post-apocalyptical Earth is not the result of totalitarian goernments or all-out nuclear wars, which are common tropes in most other stories that take place in the future. Instead, the world has been laid to waste due to mass-consumerism, led by the megacorporation Buy N Large, a corporation that makes everything so quick n’ easy for people, that eventually, the entire planet is destroyed due to the environmental ramifications due to Buy N Larg’es quick n’ easy mantra. Wall-E is the last of the many robots that once roamed the Earth solely to clean up after the humans, who have since left the trash-laden planet. Therefore, simply the existance of Wall-E shows how lazy humans have become; rather than clean up afer themselves, they must leave the job to robots and leave their home to live on a spaceship, which is a direct consequence of their modernization and resulting laziness.
Later in the film, when Wall-E gains access to the spaceship that the humans are residing on, this theme is taken even further. Every single human is now morbidly obese and unable to walk, due to the centuries that the humans in space have relied on the ship’s automated systems for thei revery need. Therefore, it is clear that even though such changes have made the human’s lives easier as no one needs to work, cook, clean, build, or plan, as the machines have become so advanced that they can do everything, it has not resulted in a better life for the humans, who are completely dependant on machines and cannot even walk by themselves. Mankind has basically turned in a group of infants, and as the movie progresses, it is clear that putting themselves in a position of such dependence on the machines, they have made a poor choice because the
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<p>machines seek to negatively control their lives. While life is now easy and free from work and stress, the quality of life for the humans has actually gone down from previous ages.</p>
<pre><code>Therefore, it is clear that modernization that results in and easier life does not always translate into a better life. If anything, an easier life often results in laziness and lethargy, which can only negatively affect society because it often creates both health problems and a lack of independence and as shown in Wall-E we can terrifyingly easily lose what makes us human.
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<p>(Haha, yes, I know the conclusions aren’t very good but there isn’t much time!)</p>