Moral and Social Dilemmas in Euthanasia: Is it Morally Right or Wrong and Whether it Should be Legalized or Banned?

Euthanasia is a very old issue, its roots can be traced back to the Classical era.  Throughout the history, this term has been understood and interpreted in different ways. In our modern era this issue started to gain more recognition even more it is considered one of the most controversial issues ever, and this due to the enhancement that health care domain has known lately, mainly improvements of medicine. People still confused about this act, whether it should be authorized or banned by the law. For some euthanasia can stand as a measure by which we can tell if a particular community enjoys individual rights, and autonomy or not at all, that is to say, one has the right to decide for his/her own destiny.  As well as, it is the act of having pity for people who are dying from terminal illness and therefore it is a doctor’s duty to end their suffering. As for those who are against euthanasia claim that the term euthanasia is an indirect expression that is substituted for “killing”, hence, euthanasia means killing. In addition to this they consider euthanasia as a violation of human life, not only this but also it is an evil act against human dignity. Now the difficulty in the issue lies in the idea that autonomy and individual rights must be encouraged so that one can take decisions about his/her own life and death with no restrictions, and that right to life must be preserved.

Additionally what is very striking in this debate is that both proponents and opponents of euthanasia use the same arguments, yet the conclusion that can be drawn from each argument is not the same, their meanings differ. Such as the argument of “human dignity”, opponents of euthanasia argue that this act is a violation of human dignity and it is the same as killing. Meanwhile, those who support euthanasia claim that by permitting this act we would be able preserve human dignity and this through helping the patient or the person who is with a terminal or pre-terminal illness to die in peace and stop their suffering.

Euthanasia’s proponents went too far with their arguments and stated that this matter is private and no one has the right to interfere, it is up to the patient to decide when , how, and where to die, with the doctor’s aid . Besides it is immoral to force a patient to continue living with unbearable pain and suffering. Clearly, they have forgotten that we live in an interdependent society, and such acts would harm the whole society physically and spiritually speaking. Namely, people would start belittling the value of life; respect for life would fade away. Under these circumstances, patients would think of themselves as a heavy weight being carried upon the shoulders of their families, friends and society. And the only thing left to be done is to undergo the process of euthanasia. Therefore, every terminally ill patient would feel the pressure to do it even though he/she doesn’t wish to, which would make of it as a rule or norm that must be followed by every patient ( terminally ill patients).  Back again to medicine, research show that only few cases for about 5% of the people with a terminal or pre-terminal disease their pain could not be subsided with drug treatment.

So I call for more efforts to be done in this regard and for more financial support to help ease the patient pain and therefore help them to die with dignity.  For that I would say that what we truly need to do is to present euthanasia as an alternative and not as a necessary thing in case the patient is not content with the medical treatment.

NB: this piece of work has been done as dedication for all the people who are suffering throughout the world whatever their religious references are: Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and the list goes on. Not forgeting to mention people who are fit God bless you.  

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Degrees in Education are not Necessary for Success in Life.

  Most of us want to be successful, yet the term success itself can be a problematic simply because each one of us has his or her own interpretation of what success is. Some argue that people with university degrees are more likely to become successful persons in the future, while others claimed that though the fact of being a person without  university or college degrees that will not prevent you from being a successful person. As an example : Michael Dell who was the founder of  Dell computers company, he was born in Texas, he attended university but drop out, his passion for technology lead him to establish one of the most well-known company in computers manufacturing domain, with a personal fortune of $20 billion. So the question that we must raise here , is university degree of immense importance for any one who wants to be successful ?

My definition to success is the state where a person accomplishes the things he or she aimed for. As well as when a person keeps thinking in a positive manner , works hard , and stays well determined while struggling to fulfill his or her dreams. For that , I say that university degree is not the only factor that determines whether a person is going to be successful or not, it is just an advantage for the person who possesses it, what counts more is the attitudes, intentions, and the way the person deals with life’s challenges.

Back again to those who support the idea that success is connected to the university degrees, I remember when we were kids our parents used to tell us you must succeed in your studies and once you get your university degrees you would be able to have a good job. But during  my life, the stories I heard and people I saw growing with me, I realized that university degrees are not that important, one has to find something that he or she is fond of and start doing it.

Truth be told university degrees can be useful in some cases, those people with university degree have great potential to have a more comfortable career, furthermore, educated people have more chances to be successful in their careers over time, they are likely to get promoted for instance, starting as a simple worker within a particular company and end up as a CEO. Yet recent studies that have been done in this concern have shown that : 12.4% of graduates were unemployed and more than half 55.9% were underemployed – which means occupying jobs that do not entail a university degree. That is to say educated people started to have difficulties to find a job that fits their profile, so they tend to work  in any kind of job given to them as long as they are hired by a company. One more thing, if university degrees are not the key to success so what counts ? It is as simple as the personal traits:  having positive attitudes, good intentions, determination and hard work. A university degree alone without those personal qualities, it will not lead you anywhere.

I must confess that the role that a university degree fulfills is great and shouldn’t  be denied that it helps people to learn a lot stuff and skills, yet it is not crucial for success. The point that I am trying to make here is that a person with a university degree does not make out of him a successful person, meanwhile those without a university degree should not be called  failures.

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End of Privacy : Social media networks have taken control over our private lives.

  

   Something called privacy in our modern time is no longer exist due to online social media networks. Now the hidden truth which only few people are aware of, is that online social media networks such as Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Google+ they allow us to connect with our friends, family, and even strangers for free, yet the scary part is that this connectivity is funded by selling our personal information to the marketing companies. Normally in business a person who uses a product is called a client but when it comes to social media networks, it does not hold true, we are the product that is being sold to their clients that of  the marketing companies.

   

   I still remember when I was a kid things were very simple, at that time social media did not exist. Everything was kept private to illustrate this, the pictures we took with our families and friends are kept in albums and people who have access to them were very few. But with the modern age things have changed people started to share everything online about their lives, I mean their personal lives. Hence nothing is private anymore. It can be said that people become addicted to feed their timeline on social media with everything and anything they are doing all day long for example sharing pictures of the food they eat, places they have been to, family issues. Therefore, it is as if social media networks have taken a total control over our lives Even more our personal lives are  being displayed on the internet. The problem is that we share stuff with  a bunch of people that we do not know, mainly with strangers seeking validation and feedback. Here is my advice that  you may not want to hear but I am going to say it anyway, the only way out of this is to be conscious of our behaviors, try to keep our business to ourselves and stop inviting the evil eye. Believe me this piece of advice will improve your life and makes you feel better about yourself too.

   I am not against social media networks, I use them too and I must confess that they are very useful, this piece of writing will be diffused and many people throughout the world will have the chance to read it and this of course thanks to social media networks. I am just trying to be frank with you and inviting you to reconsider your usage of these tools, I would say you do not  need to feel the pressure to put everything online about your life seeking validation and compliments that is somehow would affect your self-esteem for instance, once we start to depend on social media networks to gain self-worth the results might be very disappointing when we do not get the number of the likes and comments we wanted to get and then our self-esteem will suffer.

   

     As a conclusion be conscious of what you are doing, and do not  let yourself get  caught up in the matrix, live your life free from the burdens created by social media. Because seriously you are great.

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how ‘s your relationship with yourself? Is it tense, or cool?

     

       Today I brought to you one of the finest issues launched recently concerning  self-help and self-improvement area, which is « self-compassion », before we get into it, I  have got a few questions for you:  are you hard or easy on yourself ? how you treat yourself  every time something in your life doesn’t go as you want it to ? are you too judgmental about your own inadequacies and faults ? do you treat yourself the way you treat the people you love? why, why not ?

     After having responding to those questions above, at least now you do have an idea about whether you enjoy a high level of self-compassion or you just don’t have any of it. Having compassion for one’s self can be the same as having compassion for others ( friends, family).  Yet in order for you to have compassion for others you must be aware of their sufferings, for instance a friend of yours, it just  happened to lose his/her own job, if you ignored the fact he/she is jobless you won’t  be able to feel compassion for how difficult  his/her  experience is. What truly happens is that you get deeply touched by others’ suffering and then your heart starts responding  in a magical way, you show caring ,warm compassionate feelings, and pity, instead of being harsh or critical towards people. Once you reached this state it means that you have acknowledged the fact that imperfection and failure are apart of the human life.

    Now back to our main concern  “Self-compassion”, it is about treating yourself the way you treat the ones you love,and stop criticizing and rebuking yourself , whenever you feel stuck , or just having a difficult experience. Self-compassion helps you to see that our imperfections, failure, and suffering are the accompaniment of life, by accepting this as a fact and as a human condition shared by all of us, then you will reach the point where you start to embrace your humanness. All these lead to increasing the level of your self-compassion.

   Bear in mind that Self-compassionate people are well aware of the fact that frustration,failure, frictions, and troubles are inevitable so they decided to be more gentle with themselves instead of whipping themselves with self-criticisms.

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Mass Media Effects on Us,,,Mass Media destroys us!

      It is the time to stop being just consumers of media products. Actually media has changed us and affected our perceptions at different levels, what was wrong turned to be right and vice versa. Hence, in my opinion the only way out of this, is through developing a filter that would help us to better analyze and evaluate anything we might find ourselves subjected to. The filter would stand as our point of reference so as to avoid getting overwhelmed by all the messages conveyed by media. One has to bear in mind that most of the things that we see, hear, or read in media is not always true, so we need to be too cautious while consuming their info. It is very important to mention that every single message being sent to us was first designed and then disseminated by professional people who know how we think. Even more they can foresee the kind of influence that their message will be leaving in us.

Here are two examples that truly prove what has been said above:

    1)    Movies That legitimize the act of suicide and make of it such a great thing, instead of picturing it as an awful thing. I did my research and I was perplexed by the hundreds of the movies I found about this particular issue, and how the movie-makers depicted people who made this suicidal behavior as heroes or shereos, which is too bad. I myself I witnessed this crime, in my neighborhood I have heard of some teenagers, who had committed it, the question that always popes into my head: where those immature people brought this idea from? I will leave this question for you open-ended!

               2)    The way women are depicted in media mainly as objects and nothing else more, so all you ladies out there don’t get mad if we treated you as our properties or something that we own. In other words women’s body is being used to increase purchases and selling. And I am telling you this is how it is going to be like or even gets worse, if we don’t wake up and try to see behind the surfaces.

As a conclusion influence is there whether you like it or not, but at least being aware of it and how it processes would help to minimize the damages.

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Talent versus Hard work

Some argue that to be talented is good enough while others claim that hard work and determination is the key to achieve success. Talent is an innate capacity that needs to develop through practice. Therefore to be talented doesn’t mean to sit all day long on the couch waiting for better results to present themselves that will not happen, in this case talent is useless. So as to avoid wasting your talents you need motivation and here where “Hard work” takes place, one needs to put his/her own talent into practice for instance in order for a writer or a singer to shine in his/her own domain and make a name for himself/herself, he/she needs to work harder and practice more and more, though the fact that he/she is that talented.

 As you can see that talent without hard work is a waste, that is to say that both talent and hard work count, thus, they must go hand in hand.

And since I am a deep thinker and always in my mind; I brought to you this delicate issue to engage you with me to help make your minds work as well, so what do you think counts more “ Talent” or “Hard work” ?

To help get the picture clearer for you, here is a great example of our times, the best

soccer player of the 21^th century Cristiano Ronaldo; I have watched a documentary about him in which he stated that all the success he achieved today was a result of ton of efforts, struggle, hard work and determination, and it has nothing to do with talent. Accordingly success will not come out of nothing, or by saying I am talented I have not to spend much time preparing I can handle it easily, as an illustration to this, those smart genius students who see their classmates study for 12 hours to get a nice mark while they have to study only for two hours and it is done, in the long run, this will not lead you anywhere, you might get worse by not working on your talent, thus it is necessary to devote a lot of time and hard work to make it happen. And going back again to soccer field so many talented players missed the chance to enter the history and to be recognized by not putting their talents into practice, and hard work.

Hence the magical formula that truly works is when you put your talent and the hard work together.

Below I will site some steps that you may need to follow in order to combine between your talent and hard work:

    ü Find out what your talent is: we all know that every human-being got something unique so you may find yourself having pleasure doing some activities over others. Some prefer art others choose sport and the list goes on.. Your main goal in this step is to find what you are good at, bear in mind that it is never too late, seek and you will find.

  ü Choose your path :  once your know what your talent is now it is the time to decided what     are you going to do with it and what your ultimate goal is ?

    ü Make progress: enough thinking and orchestrating it is the time to make progress, one move each day with having a clear vision of the goal you are aiming for will lead to where you destined to be.

     ü And finally stick to hard work: never let disappointment and fear creep into your heart and mind, keep working harder no matter what takes, at the end you will see the light, blessings and opportunities.

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The Art of listening and its immense importance

Listening is an awesome skill that the majority neglects in our days; people tend to talk more than listening, while it should be completely the opposite. I witnessed this in several situations, as an illustration, whenever the chance comes I and my friends met, we normally do what ordinary people do, which is indulging in a discussion. Yet, if you contemplate our discussion more carefully you would notice the same thing I noticed, which is very striking, in the middle of our conversation we reached the point where we no longer listen to each other, I mean the «effective listening», where you activate your conscious and start interpreting what the other is trying to say instead of preparing the astonishing thing that you will say once the other finishes his or her own speech. More precisely, we just turned the conversation into a competition, who talks most wins, each one of us is trying to show how skillful is in talking. And here where the main purpose behind communicating is missed. Mainly, what we have here is a failure to communicate.

If we stop for a second and think about this, it would become clearer for us to see that we truly need to reconsider our behavior while interacting with people, friends, or family members; remember that in every conversational event, the person who speaks least benefits most. I have always wanted to tackle this issue, since the chance comes now; I am going to break it down for you in more details by providing you with some helpful hints so as to help you boost and sharpen your listening skill.

1)    Be Open-minded while listening: this stands for the idea that while listening to what the speaker says, do not allow for yourself to be emotionally triggered, and avoid being so sensitive, instead of doing that you would rather try to be open to the difference and therefore provide more space for new ideas and insights to come in, and here where the growth takes place, to put it simply you accumulate knowledge. And KNOWLEDGE is Power.

2)    Watch your body postures: body language plays a very important role to show interest, for instance while listening to what the other is saying, try to make eye contact with him or her, that would help you to focus more during the conversation as well as it encourages more the speaker to open up to you and tell you everything. Your main duty while someone is talking is to process every single word he/she says even though the topic doesn’t concern you believe me one day will, this happened to me so many times.

3)   Ask questions: this tool is very helpful and it engages you as well, in order to be able to  ask good questions, it entails to pay a full attention to what the speaker is saying not only this but also interpreting what he or she is saying. In my opinion, by applying particularly this method certainly you will become a great listener. 

To sum up, this article is not encouraging you to remain silent, but it was just an opportunity for all of us to reconsider our behavior while conversing with one another or collectively, as I mentioned earlier. Don’t you ever underestimate that Skill!!!

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Unemployment Stress and Ways to handle it

Nowadays, being unemployed (jobless) is one of the most difficult problems , that the educated segment  of the society suffers most from, mainly after having getting their college graduation and diplomas.  Therefore being aware of how to cope with it becomes a necessity.  The motive behind writing this humble article is to shed light on some of the outcomes of being unemployed or without a job.  The good news is that I am not going only to list those consequences but also try to provide you with some substitutions that would help you to get out the most out of being unemployed. It is very crucial to say that we must avoid to look at this experience as a source of evil and troubles, on the contrary it can be a great chance to re-evaluate , map-out , and ask ourselves what we truly want out of life. Therefore I think by developing this kind of thinking we would be able to benefit the most from this period of recession. Now some of the problems that escort being unemployed :

• Fall prey for negativity and negative thinking.

• Second being depressed, stressed and sad.

• Third, lack of organization and lack of control of one’s lif.

Remember that when one door closes another opens, so I am inviting my readers and everyone who is reading this right now, to stay optimistic about the future, and bear in mind that everything we go through now is preparing us for what we asked for. Being optimistic helps to look at the bright sides of any event and situation, and always hope for the best to come. Here are some few tips that truly worked with me:

• Set for yourself goals that are achievable, and try to develop a plan in which you list the steps that you are going to follow to reach them: It is a good thing to have goals, they give us the sense of direction and focus, yet the problem is that a lot of people don’t act on their goals and in here the goals turn to be as fantasies, “Goals are something you are acting on. Dreams are something you are just thinking about “, so to sum up, acting on your goals is of immense importance

• Try to learn new skills for instance, computing, looking for free courses on-line, and reading books: Learning new stuff can be very useful; it broadens your knowledge and keeps you up-to date.

• Pay more attention to your health and this can be through  practicing sport regularly, eating healthy food , and sleeping well :  excersing helps to release “Endorphins“ and “Serotonin“ which make you feel good about yourself and even more happy, the research show that people who exercise three times per week suffer less from anxiety and stress.  In addition the very fact of eating clean and healthy food improves your mental health, for instance when you don’t eat well you feel a bit dizzy, tired and your head starts to hurt. So eat well and clean. As a conclusion is very important to pay attention to all these components because they are interrelated, one depends on the other.

Note: This modest contribution was inspired by a personal experience that of mine, I myself suffered at the very beginning.  Actually I have passed through three main phases: 1-initial shock, 2-stressed over things that are out of my control, And finally 3- adjustment in other words, I started to reconcile and deal with the situation in a positive manner, instead of focusing on the dark sides I have decided to look for the bright sides and always expecting the best!

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