Happy Documentary by Roko Belic
- Everyone wants the American dream
- Children/Family are the most precious gifts- being grateful
- Happiness helps you reach other goals
- Those with less know true happiness
- “Genetic set-point”
- 10% circumstance contributes to your happiness
- Intentional behavior- not adapting to habitual subconscious behavior
- Change is important
- Stillness, simplicity, and nature all add to happiness “good medicine”
- Dopamine- neurotransmitter (loose the older you get)
- Seek out experiences like physical activity- aerobic exercise
- Live your life in tranquility
- “In the Zone” like playing the piano allows you to feel in control because you know what is coming next and you forget selfish mannerisms
- “Flow” –forgetting ego-centric feelings and that life is worth living
- Good and Bad events = be able to recover from adversity due to growing learning experiences
- “People do really good when things go really bad”
- “I don’t understand, I don’t need to understand, and that’s okay”
- You have a choice to be happy
- There is no such thing as pleasure without pain!
- Less technology = more content (ex. Tiny House)
Connected, but alone? by Sherry Turkle
- “Getting that text is like getting a hug”
- 1996 1stted talk
- Exploring different aspects of ourselves
- Virtual world— identity of ourselves
- I believe that we are letting us take us places that we don’t want to go
- Not engaging with the self
- Mobile communications- plugged in
- Little devices are so psychologically powerful- not only change what we do, it changes who we are
- Odd or disturbing—now are familiar and normal
- Important skill of eye contact while texting
- Children complain about not having their parent’s full attention.
- Being together while not being together
- Texting at funerals— remove ourselves from our grief
- We are setting ourselves up for trouble in how we relate to ourselves and others and capacity for self-reflection
- People want to customize their life—control over where people put their attention
- End up hiding from each other even as we are constantly connected to each other
- Doesn’t want to interrupt their colleagues because they are too busy on their emails.
- People don’t want to be interrupted
- Goldilocks effect
- What’s wrong with having a conversation – it takes place in real time and won’t let you control the way
- We get to edit, and we get to delete
- Not too little, not too nice, just right
- We clean them up
- We sacrifice conversation with communication
- Profound question—don’t all those little tweets, add up to one big gulp of little conversations?
- Don’t work for learning about each other- to learn how to have conversations with ourselves
- Compromise our capacity for conversation
- I would rather text than talk
- No one is listening to me— so many automatic listeners
- Makes us want to spend time with machines
- Trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience
- Vulnerable—experience pretend empathy as if it is the real thing
- It doesn’t face death, it doesn’t know life— I found it one of the most wrenching complicated moments in her life
- We expect more from technology, and less from each other
- Technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable—we are afraid of intimacy
- We are not so comfortable and not in control= changing minds and hearts
- We will never have to be alone- central to changing our psyches
- Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved
- I share therefore I am
- If we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves
- Solitude is where you find yourself and reach out to other people
- Using them as spare parts
- Always being connected is going to make us feel less alone—opposite—if we are not able to be alone, we are going to be lonely
- Reclaim spaces for conversation
- Don’t have time to talk about the things that matter- we all need to really listen to each other
- When we stumble or hesitate, we reveal ourselves to each other.
- Recognize our vulnerability- listen when technology says it can take something complicated and simplify it/ hopeful/ optimistic
- Real lives, own bodies, our own planet