#thought provokers

[thinkscholar]

Every App in Your Phone Promises a Happier You

Every app wants me to be happier than I am right now: Food delivery app: Get happiness delivered at home in 15 minutes E-commerce App: Add a little happiness to your cart with our exclusive deals Social media apps: Happy if you go on vacations like my friend Marriage Apps: Get the best partner in life and be happy forever Dating App: be happy, date a person who understands you Fitness App: Find…

Every App in Your Phone Promises a Happier You

[helpfromheaven]

Thought Provokers #2

A Guy Named Bloke presented eight thought provoking questions that I could not resist.

What is one life lesson that you have had to learn the hard way?

That when you hear God screaming, “No,” in your ears, and you decide that you know better than God, then you will suffer the consequences that God tried to prevent. The good news is that He will still walk beside you and comfort you through…

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[mlvntan]

Mini Meditations: Prayer Postures Pinned to Thought Provokers by Steven Prelgovisk

[solitrewq]

Homeless

Walking through the Austin airport a couple days ago, I finally felt like I was back. In the US, that is. And yet, I still had one more flight left in my list of flights, a list that has been seemingly endless over the past four years, new future flights appearing just as quickly as they left. A list that has defined my life, telling me where I was to call home next, until it became clear that the meaning of home was rather... unclear. Walking through the Austin airport a couple days ago, I realized that I wasn’t home.

When crossing the border into Canada last year, the guard asked me the standard, “where are you from?” question. This led to an explosion of confusion crowding my brain. My North Carolina school? My Texas “permanent address” that was listed on the license in his hand? My Washington temporary address? Or was he asking about my rental car with Oregon plates? Where was I from indeed.

I haven’t spent more than four months in the same timezone for a long time, I’ve lived at seven addresses long enough to ship Amazon products to them, I’m a pro at dealing with rental cars and hotels, and I strongly suspect that I will have enough miles to qualify for MVP airline membership next year. Even my dad has pointed out to my mom numerous times that for me the word “home” doesn’t apply to house I’m sitting in right now.

So where has my home been? Maybe my backpack, which is never far from me and nearly always provisioned with food, money, work, my identity, and small generally useful items. I take it with me through airports, roadtrips, class, study sessions, and wherever I slept that day. It is true, I’m comfortable where my backpack is.

Yet that complicates the idea of “home” a bit, it makes it a bit more... transitory. And really, what’s the point of a home concept if it shifts constantly? In fact that’s pretty much an oxymoron unto itself. And yet, what other definitions do I have? The world is my home? No, much as that would be nice, there are too many foreign places to me and that also pretty much ruins the need for a home concept. Home is where my friends are? ...oops. Unless that refers to Facebook, they’re a bit scattered at the moment.

I suppose the simple answer could be that home is wherever I make it. And maybe I should work on that. I’m going to get on my last flight in a long list of flights now.

[solitrewq]

Broken

I listen well, or so people say sometimes. Maybe it's because I don't say much so people feel the need to fill in the silences, maybe it's because I seem like I have the mental capacity to understand, maybe my natural facial expression just looks like someone who's paying attention, who knows.

Or maybe it's because I actually care. I care because it helps others and I care because it helps me - it reminds me that everyone struggles. And that's the thing. Everybody is fighting (or for the lucky ones, recovering from) something on a deep level, severe hurt, helplessness, inexplicable sadness, challenged beliefs, circumstances, other people, themselves... we live in a society of unbroken people in which everybody is broken.

I'm starting to believe that it's as essential as every other human trait, it's what keeps things going, we're all on a quest to fix ourselves. It's the quintessential question, why do we fall? Why do we ALL fall? So we have a reason to keep going, to keep caring, to keep trying, to keep doing.

And in this society where we have plenty of resources, where injuries, conditions and diseases are temporary, where people are free to associate with whomever they wish, go pursue whatever they want... our brains start breaking for us. As disease death rates fall, mental illnesses and suicides rise precipitously. When nothing is wrong at all, we need something to fight, something to struggle with and suddenly those who have found nothing to struggle with find themselves saddled with the deadliest opponent of all, their minds.

Why? Why would our minds have such a deadly "safety mechanism"? It means that somehow, inexplicably, the alternative is even worse. To have no struggles is to have no purpose, not even able to give up because there's nothing to give up on. We lose the ability to feel, to love, to trust... and like it or not those particular traits are the key to our survival, and so also become the key to fulfillment in our lives.

Because from a purely logical standpoint, love and trust don't make sense. You decide that your survival is not solely contained in your own self's survival but the survival of others, you start to expend energy towards helping others, you start to put yourself at risk for people that aren't you. Worst of all, you give someone else the ability to hurt you, to break you in unimaginable ways. 

As Ender Wiggins so delicately phrased it:

I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

(if you haven't read Ender's Game, you should)

But apparently the other option, a world without love and trust, is unsustainable. Nothing would ever happen. So we live on, broken as we are, because it gives us an excuse to need others, because it allows others to need us. So that we have something to trust someone else with when the time is right.

[daytripper5]

Nothing is so necessary to happiness than the company of reasonable intelligence.

ⓦⓐⓜⓗ

[solitrewq]

Technological Communication [Pt. 2]

...one year later. The lost second half to this post. (this was written March 2013)

There's been a developing love/hate relationship with social technology within me of late. For younger me, technology WAS my social life, it shaped who I am today, and gave me a chance to interact with volumes more people, interesting people, than I probably would have if born into my family 10 years earlier. I'm forever grateful for that.

But now around me, I see the other side to technology's invasion of how we communicate. Somehow we've become stuck in a weird loop where we're constantly seeking better ways to communicate, better ways to share information, better ways to met people, better ways to express ourselves, yet somehow, whatever we are doing looks less and less like communication each passing day.

I've known the richness of communication through technology, likely far more intimately than most, it's often unexpectedly powerful and can build more depth in a relationship than an uninitiated person would expect. But this is something different, people actually hide behind phones (how did that become socially acceptable?). Somewhere along the line, body language and intonation became fuzzy audio waves and pictures, and then audio became words on a screen and then words on a screen became ever more vague words on a screen, sometimes indirectly aimed at communicating with a person, or two. Our ability to preserve everything for nobody has become increasingly natural.

And as our ability to communicate becomes increasingly weak, our constant search for communication grows more and more desperate. We feel lost when we leave our phones at home for a day, or even an hour. Facebook has to be accessible at all times... and honestly, I don't know where this is headed.

It's another one of those things where we're so intent on searching that we miss exactly what we're searching for. The language of body language is growing evermore disused (except... in Google April Fools pranks?) and yet it is far more informative, rich, and less prone to miscommunications than any other method of communication we've been able to come up with. Go say hi to a friend today. In person.