So alot has hapened over the last week; my computer has failed me, I've been at home for God knows how long, alot of rain (rain... rain has it's effects on me >__> ), even went on a (casual) date. It's been a busy week. Now (and I've never actually mentioned this on the blog before) I'm a total manga otaku (and if you don't know manga, in this case, refers to eastern comics on a whole, and an otaku is an "avid enthusiast"). And over the past week (due to using my mother's laptop) my intrnet usage has been reduced to twitter, facebook and manga. (darn you outated flash player and complicated circumstances) But yeah since 3rd form (or 9th grade or whatever) till now I've read an enormous amount of this stuff (to the point that I'm almost proud of it... which I'm guessing I shouldn't be)...
Anyways, my obsessi- I mean- avid enthusiasm isn't the subjct of this post. But like any media, especially in the realm of entertainment, manga of all genres and from all writers are about people; and though this may not seem like the best place to draw conclusions about people from; I know (being a writer myself) that you write from experience. You create charcters dependent on your grasp of the people you've met, interacted with, observed or simply seen. (Now I'm just not making any sense, I should just go into what I'm saying)
I've often said that I love people, and I truly do, and in my 17 (meh call it 18) years of existence I've had the opportunity to meet more people than my poor excuse for memory can account for. So in this post I'll (try) to point out some of the things I've realised about people some through experience and some probably through dubious means like (I dont know.....) fictional charcters made by people half-way across the globe (though I won't mention them after this point though). But hey, It's my blog, and my *Immediate* Thoughts.
1. We are people who tend to understand others more than we understand ourselves
Have you ever given advice to someone after hearing their situation that is PERFECTLY applicable to yours, then wonder 'why don't I follow my own advice'??? As I've realised we really don't know ourselves half as well as we think we do. Like think about it. When it comes to other people; ets say for instance, our friends. We do in fact have an innate understanding (at least on a basic level) of our friends. We understand how their humour works (know which jokes we can run from which ones we can't), we understand how they generally reacht to certain situations, we understand what they think about certain things etc. Most of this, ofcourse, is due to maybe trial and error, observation etc. However from the beginning of this friendship, there had to be some mutual understanding, by whatever means. I guess similarities, shared interests etc count but they're not sufficient. I've come to be friends with people who i have little or nothing in common with... I believe that in our incredible social arsenal as humans we have the capability of understanding people. However, this capability doesn't quite seem to work that well on ourselves. We do understand ourselves somewhat, but we can hide things from ourselves, things that we need deep self reflection or (get this) SOMEONE ELSE POINTING IT OUT to actually discover.
2. We are people who love to segregate
We see it everyday. We create groups, and then turn groups against each other. Now conflict is our nature blah, blah, blah but we're really stupid about how we use it. I mean we become antagonistic towards people for the worst reasons. Race, gender, the school you go to, the place you come from... Things which sometimes don't even have any personal bearing on your life. And it creates this culture of steretyping which saddens me. I mean it's one thing to make a joke comcerning a stereotype, biut there are people who actually believe that you can bundle people together and stick a tag on them. (now in my lectures on "originality this" and "individuality that" you can basically understand my views on this) What feeds this, however, are two parts of our nature.
1. The need for belonging: we love being part of a group, belonging somewhere, having an identity as such.
2. The need for superiority: we love being in a better osition than others (or atleast feeling that we're in a better position than others) so if we can tag a whole sub group of poeple as being in a worse condition than we are then we will do it.
Neither of these are bad in themselves, it's just how we've approached them. if instead of labeling people as being worse than us we actually worked to be better (and all of us did) then I'm sure the world would be a better place. Similarly if we created our groups in a way that doesn't require antagonism against other groups then we could all work towards ur own superiority (if not over others over our "past self"... (Though i'm just a 17 year old idealist... what do I know??)
3. We are a people whose intentions and actions aren't necessarily coherent
We can legitimately do good things for bad reasons (vice versa). And for some reason it humours me. It makes me wonder how may people were hailed as heroes or imprisoned as criminals while their motives dictated would've dictated the opposite. Like how many people have killed out of love or rescued out out of hatred. We are driven by so many forces yet what we are driven to do is almost completely independent. To me, it's funny... But then it makes one think about one's own motives.
4.We are people who grasp after "impossibilities"
A few years ago the though that the mass of human knowledge, research and discoveries could be held in a man's pocket would have been deemed "impossible" yet now we have the internet which in a way is pretty much just that. A some years before that flight was also "impossible" and we all know how that unravelled. Even now in our imaginations we continually grasp after the things that we are incapable of (look at our entertainment...) The prospect of one day reaching something tomorrow that was impossible today is one of the driving forces behind our personal, and global development.
haaa so I ended up blabbing on about near-useless stuff and this may be a somewhat boring post after all (>_<) but bear with me. And I look forward to- whoaaa looking back on this post it's pretty long... haha, I got carried away. Anyways remember, in every situation; We are People: Nothing More, Nothing Less.
-Me
No comments:
Post a Comment