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Thorton Wilder once said, "My advice is not to ask why or wither; just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." However, when critically thinking about his statement, a question arises. Can we really enjoy something without asking why or wither? Or is part of enjoyment the mental savoring of the experience?
An ice cream bowl full with perfectly circular scoops sat in front of me. It was supposed to taste like Twix, some new flavor from Breyer's. I began to eat it, but also turned on a game called Final Fantasy 12. Soon, I had forgotten I even had ice cream at all; pausing only for bare seconds, i gulped down whatever was left of it, the game clearly being of a higher priority to me. If it had not been my deliberate forceful attempt at eating ice cream, I would not even remember that I had any that day. It seemed to taste weird, maybe not sweet enough. I didn't enjoy myself and I didn't want to finish it, but there’s shame in letting good food go to waste. Without asking why I was eating it, I did not enjoy the ice cream, nor did it leave an impression upon my day.
The following evening, the same bowl was poised before me; the same amount of the same flavor, to be fair with the experiment. I sat alone in my room and closed the door, trying to shut off all sounds. Surprisingly, the ice cream tasted really good. After my first trial, I had suspected that I just didn’t' like this flavor, but it was everything i had hoped for when i bought it; smooth and sweet caramel, crunchy little balls of cookie, and mound upon mound of perfect vanilla ice cream. In this instance, it almost seemed too sweet; sometimes, I would get ahead of myself and my teeth would hurt from the cold, but it was worth it. I kept thinking about the different aspects of the ice cream and how I could later describe them, which made me enjoy it even more. "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates once said. Being a direct opposite of Wilder's quote, it seems to me like this one is much more accurate. After all, what is beautiful summer roses if you don't stop to think about them and enjoy their sweet smells?
If one does not notice the life around them, that life might as well not exist. My feelings regarding the first experience with the Twix ice cream were so neutral, that I'm sure it would have made no difference at all if I had never eaten it at all; thus the existentialist viewpoint comes in. Existentialists believe that whether or not you do something, the outcome would not be changed. However, a more accurate description might be whether you do something without paying attention to all its details or don't do it, the outcome will remain the same. Rene Descartes said it best; "I think, therefore I am." Biologically, thinking is what separates us from most other animals. What separates humans from people, on the other hand, is analysis of the world around them. Any human thinks basic thoughts, moves, talks, does all the things we expect humans to do. A person, on the other hand, experiences life more fully by providing that self-analytical view, a 6th sense almost, which complements the other 5 senses. Thinking about our experiences is what separates life from existence, in all its simplicity. That is why the second ice cream experience was much more pleasant than the first.