This week in Sociology we started off the week by watching a movie, Tuesdays with Morrie, which was about an old man slowly dying and his lessons that he taught to a middle-aged man who had little sense of direction in his life. Through many laughs and deep talks, they developed a strong relationship and Morrie changed the man's life forever. The movie taught us a lot on how to live, and also emphasized cultural values us as Americans have. Morrie emphasized to Mitch that Mitch should stop working so much and just stop and realize what is most imporant to him- his relationship with Janine, his passions for music, and overcoming his fears of confrontation and death. The American value of work as a dominant activity in life affects our everyday life and is easily compared to other cultures that are not so focused on their work, but are instead focused on their families, friends, and experiences. Also, Morrie brought up a point about how the American culture nearly shuns away the idea of death and values the hiding of true emotions on any given situation, and Morrie argued that in order to lead a successful life, one cannot simply be afraid of what they deem as "awkward" situations. This movie offered great lessons on life, as well as gave a better insight to AMerican values and how that affects our daily lives as Americans.
We also looked at the concept of Happiness and read an excerpt from the book, "Thrive", which described different ways that happiness can be created in your everyday life, from having a garden, to seeing theatre performances on the weekend. THis article gave great insight to how the AMerican culture allows us to achieve happiness, but also how it hinders it. Our firm value of work and individualism is a hinderance to achieving happiness, but our sense of equality (for the most part) encourages happiness. Salituro also told us about a test that would determine one's level of happiness. I took it and got a B+, but arguably, I'm not sure if happiness is neccesarily something that can, or should be, measured by a statistic or grade or percentage. Happiness, in itself, is a very complex and varying emotion, and I am unsure what the criterion of "being happy" truly is. Is happiness something you determine for yourself or something society determines for you? This question stayed in the back of my head while reading these articles and really made me reconsider my idea of happiness and what I can do to achieve my own definition of happiness.
Our experiment, referred to as the "Do nothing" experiment was incredibly rewarding and showed so much about our society and human inclination as a whole. Here is what i wrote for the reflection of the experience:
" In Dominick's, with many people walking around with their lists of things to buy and tight schedule, I sttood in the bakery session, turned my phone off and did absolutely mnoting. At least I thought i was doing nothing. However, I soon realized I wasn't doing nothing- I was simply just doing everything, but only in me head. My mind was a cluster of thoughts on stress and emotions about both the past and future. What was strange, however, was that I wasn't thinkiing about the present- adn then i realiized that us as humans never really do think about the present that much. We are instead always thinking what did happen, and what is going to happen. Why is that? Also, I was originally assuming people would look at me and ponder why I was doing nothing, but then I realized how consumed each person that passed me by with what they wanted to do and wanted to pursure their purpose for walking to the meat aisle or snack aisle and were basically oblivious to the fact that i was just standing there. Us, as humans, always feel the need to have something to do, and we can be so distracted by our own stask that we forget to be sociologically aware of the people around us. This exeriment led to many thought-provoking concepts and I really enjoyed it."
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