The meaning of life is something you decide on your own, for yourself. It can be anything, from being good and helping others to creating a life for yourself. Everyone has their own meaning in life and I believe that's what really gives life meaning.
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Today was the last day of the project. I got a little bit more footage for my video and I finished putting it all together. On Monday after school I have to present to a lot of people including parents, I hope I do good.
When I arrived at school I was placed in a team with which I was to present my video with. I was placed with my team because all of the members, like me, had decided to create a video. After meeting with my team, I went to yet another workshop to learn about robots and artificial intelligence. During this workshop we were faced with tough questions such as if machines were able to think, would they be given rights and considered human? Would they eventually surpass us and cause us to be irrelevant? Honestly it was a pretty scary workshop considering that we were pretty much told that machines would take over the world. After worrying about the fate of the world, I started to create my video. I decided to create a documentary type video so I went around using my fancy camera to ask people what they thought the meaning of life was. I got a lot of good footage during school and started to edit it and put it together at home.
The first assignment today was to create a SCRUM board. If you don't know what that is, it's pretty much a to-do list but I little more complicated and honestly I very much disliked it and it was no help to me whatsoever. After this I went to the fitness room to lift weights and get a talk about what it means to "be a man". Personally what I learned during the experience was that men and women are really just the same, we're all just people. But because of social norms, men are expected to "act tough" and "be a man". I learned that this is unhealthy and really that it's okay to cry sometimes. I then went to a workshop on different religions around the world. This is and was something that really interested me seeing how many different beliefs there are and how similar and different they are. This is also what we did in the workshop, creating a Venn diagram to help see how shockingly similar the completely different religions are. At the end of the day I had finally made up my mind and decided to start creating a video to submit as my aforementioned required "artifact".
The first thing that I did today was finish my mind map. This didn't take that long and soon after I went to a workshop on music and how it can make you happy. Everyone there created a playlist of 5 songs and at the end of the workshop we listened to them all. What I learned from this is that different things make different people happy because of their experiences. I then went to the Science of the Mind workshop. In this workshop we learned about the physical side of feelings. At the end of the day we were told that we were required to create an "artifact" to show what we learned over the week and I started to think about what medium I would use.
We started out the day by answering four questions on a piece of paper and putting our answers into balloons. Nearly right after, we popped the balloons and this was supposed to represent letting our thoughts out. After this, we formed temporary partnerships for the next part of our project. We then left our school and went out into the public to ask people some questions about their perspectives on life. The questions were if they believed that humans have free will, what makes life worth living, and if it was ever okay to choose the lesser of two evils. Everyone that I interviewed believed that humans do have free will and that it's better to choose the lesser of two evils. In case you don't understand what exactly the lesser of two evils is, as did I, imagine for some reason that you're being forced to kill a group of people. But you're given the option of killing a single person instead of the group. But if you choose to do neither, someone else will kill all of them. The question that got a lot of different answers was, what makes life worth living? Some people said being able to do what you love while others said things such as God and their friends. Personally I feel that everyone has their own answer and everyone's answer is just as right as everyone else's. Near the end of the day, we began to work on our mind maps which we'll be using for our work tomorrow, but I'm not exactly sure how. When we first began this project I believed that life really doesn't have a meaning and we should just do whatever we want because well, why not? But I've spent nearly a whole day thinking about it now and as much as I do believe this, I also believe that we should be good. The only problem with this is that there is no true good, only everyone's individual definition. I don't know how to tell you I know there's a good and bad, but I know that when I do some things I feel good and when I do other things I feel "bad" such as guilt which shouldn't make sense because if life has no meaning and we should do whatever we want to, why do some things make me feel just not good?
This week my entire school has decided to take a break from the traditional way of teaching to try something new. Pilot week. Instead of having different periods throughout the day, each grade worked on a single project for an entire week. The sophomore class, which I am in, focused on trying to find the meaning of life. We called the project The Big Think.
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Austin Chavoen |