The Philosophy of Gilligan's Island

Whatever your own aspirations, and whatever are the difficulties in reaching them, you can if you like call the latter your condition of being stranded, the island on which you are stuck, and you can refer to the former as the task of "getting off the island."

Thus the situation that provides the plot of most of the series' episodes is quite generalizable.

The heart of the philosophy of the show is this: to achieve anything in life, you have to suppress your inner Gilligan. Some part of you probably has adapted pretty well to your island, to the limits of your life, to the frustration of your ambitions. That part of you will frustrate efforts to get off the island. But it (he) will do so in an amiable way, a way that doesn't look like sabotage, and that may even seem ... funny.

DON'T TOLERATE THAT. Be tough on your inner Gilligan.

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