YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
Phrase: Desperate times call for desperate measures
Travelling overseas in my youth without a financial umbilical cord to my parents was one of the best things I have ever done.
I believe that only when faced with great adversity do people genuinely get to know themselves.
They say desperate times call for desperate measures, but you really cannot predict what you will do until that situation manifests itself and you find yourself having to deal with it.
For example, if you found yourself alone and penniless in a foreign city, what would you do?
That would indeed be a drastic situation, so what kind of drastic measures or actions would you be willing to take?
Well, I found myself sleeping on a beach in Sydney, Australia, for three nights until I found a job selling chocolate in office towers.
I never want to do either one again.
In both situations, people judged me as being less than they were.
However, I was desperate, so I took desperate measures to get out of that situation.
Now, it’s a good story, but then it was embarrassing.
Perhaps others would have stolen food or even worse.
It is easy enough for us to condemn people who break the law because desperate times call for desperate measures, and find themselves in terrible circumstances.
This is a quote I like from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
Charles Dickens
We should always try to understand the circumstances of others before we judge them too harshly.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we don’t know how desperate some people feel.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 70.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
