This is the latest to come from current teen queen young Ms. Cyrus. Mind you, her father, old Billy Ray and mother were both present at the photo shoot. But now, that Disney (the very powerful network that pays the Cyrus's) has concerns that the photos are too provocotive, Miley Cyrus or Hannah Montana, or whatever her name is, is apologizing. What could mom and dad have possibly been thinking? Oh, wait let me guess, perhaps they were thinking about a lucrative paycheck from Vanity Fair. Hmm... I wonder if that may have been it. This girl is pimped by her own parents, while they adamantly claim that she will never turn out like Britney, or Lindsey. This girl walks the red carpet in designer gowns, looks at least twenty one, but young girls are supposed to see her as a role model. Mom and Dad should take a long hard look at their motivations before little Miley is too far gone. Remember this is the same girl who has had controversial photos posted on the net already (twice). I feel sorry for her.
Heres the story:
Pop star and 15-year-old Disney sensation MILEY CYRUS tells ET she's "embarrassed" about an upcoming photograph of her appearing semi-topless in the new Vanity Fair issue.
"I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed," she tells ET. "I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about."
The photo, on stands next week, accompanies an interview with Miley and her dad, BILLY RAY, and were shot by famed photographer ANNIE LEIBOVITZ. As seen on our show promo last week, they show Miley sitting in profile with just a blanket wrapped around her chest.
Vanity Fair editors respond: "Miley's parents and/or minders were on the set all day. Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley.
In fact, when BRUCE HANDY interviewed Miley, he asked her about the photo and she was very cheerful about it and thought it was perfectly fine."
However, a Disney Channel spokesperson says: "Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines."
4/28/2008
Another shining example for teens.
4/27/2008
Our Teens are Running Wild
The problem is not new, nor should it be fodder for gossip. Today’s teens are simply running wild. They are greater risk takers, more sexually active and overly informed than any teenage population that came before. From MTV pimping over the top Sweet Sixteen celebrations, as voyeuristic glances into the tiny percentage of the population that can afford to have Usher at their parties. To “reality dating” shows modeling behaviors that are breeding at risk teens and young adults, by promoting excessive drinking and providing hot tubs as an option for each date. The media and the freely accessible Internet access colludes with the corruption of our teenage children. Yet, it is as if we forget that the main responsibility for what our teens do falls squarely on parents for no other influence is as great and as influential as that of family.
Web 2.0 and “social networking” are a much more effective means of communication utilized feverishly by adolescents. Advancements such as video chats, give adolescent the more private forum to “explore” with various behaviors and cultures, alternate lifestyles and some really out there “freakish” things we as adults can’t even grasp. There are now translators for the slang used by kids to “text message” one another. Yes the illiterate language devised to further stunt any thinking that might be needed to right in full sentences.
Do we want our kids paralyzed by gadgets? Do we want our kids informed by those that have the freedom to express absolutely any view they wish and with pictures and video to make it more entertaining, such as the site The Church of Euthanasia. As a teacher and writer I use the Internet to a almost embarrassing degree for both information gathering and inspiration for my writing efforts. I Googled euthanasia for a student who was assigned the topic as a final paper in her English class. This essay was to be a persuasive argument for or against the controversial practice. About five to seven links down the results of the search was the link to the church that I mentioned. Clicking on the site I gasped and shook with anxiety as I finally understood what we (parents, teachers, kids) were up against. The site promotes among other things, death in all forms, sodomy an suicide. So there I was doing what my students were by researching the topic, and there it was, like any other site. Organized (not well) just enough to have their information viewed and their “Four Pillars” defined. I will not share the ideas espoused by this website, but you should take a look sometime and see what your kids read for their school projects.
Then there is the inevitable Hollywood influence. Our kids love music and movies just like we did. Yet they are getting to hear about and watch the pop idols they worship live the most reckless and dangerous of lives. Pregnant Disney TV show stars, the network is probably scrambling to find a way to separate themselves from the shamed star of their show "Zoey 101" as we learn that young Jamie Lynn Spears may have been having an “affair” with an older executive. Wholesome teenage fun for the whole family, right? The media is stoning Lynne Spears, and yes her daughters are particularly frightening, but is she to blame?
The Megan Meier’s story is particularly disturbing and has all the elements that are facilitating an adolescent epidemic of risk taking and poor judgment. To quickly sum up the Megan Meier’s story is difficult for there are many layers. It involves female friendships, parenting skills, MySpace, boys and very irresponsible adults. Megan apparently had a falling out with her close friend and neighbor and this neighbors Mom Lori Drew was concerned that Megan was going to say indecent things about her daughter. She quickly created a MySpace profile of a young handsome boy she named Josh Evans from a neighboring town, and started communicating with Megan in a flirtatious way. Megan had been dealing with self esteem issues along with every other adolescent, and found the attention of the young man exciting. He was cute and sweet and could really understand her. He told her she was pretty and wanted to be her boyfriend. She had no reason to think anything else was happening. Three weeks into the Internet relationship, he turned on Megan and said she was not the kind of person he wanted to associate with due to things he heard from kids at her school. She responded with shock, tears and hanging herself with a belt as her parents got ready for dinner downstairs. It was quickly disclosed that the boy with whom Megan had bonded was really a collaborative effort of a family, initiated by the matriarch Mrs. Drew, and maintained by all. They explained that they started the profile on MySpace to protect their daughter from slanderous talk (never did Megan say a bad thing about her neighbor or anyone else). Since the rest of the neighborhood found out about the families twisted game, the Drew's has complained of harassment on several occasions. To date there will be no charges found against the MySpace family hoax or any of the participants. A tragedy like this is unthinkable yet it is subtle, societal and scary.
If the teenagers seem frightening as they shoot up shopping malls during the holidays, is it possible to assume that the parents must have something to do with it? As the story of Megan illustrates the power of the Internet on our young ones, it also shows parents as they set the example for their children. Taunting a young person for fun, causing pain and perpetuating deceit are lessons these parents clearly imparted to their own children. What do we do as members of society to protect our kids from such insidiousness?
There are several basic parenting principles that can have a positive impact on children. Use them, and perhaps we can gain back control just enough to produce citizens who we could be proud of. These basics are not “new age” and they are certainly not difficult to grasp, but do we care to save our kids? Perhaps we should try.
Boundaries are a necessity for kids. They want and need them and parents have to provide them. Without understanding their own boundaries and those of others, kids have no way to gauge their attitudes and behaviors. It is not as simple as saying something is good or bad, right or wrong, but why and in what scenario? Guiding adolescents by defining boundaries allows them to process social behavior and respond to it. Lynne Spears allowed her young daughter, underage and naive to not only have an older boyfriend but to basically co-habitate with him. Some may say, “at least I know they are safe, they are home after all.” Yet the child was fourteen if the story is at all accurate, when she began dating this young man. If at fourteen this type of behavior is accepted then it stands to reason that two years into a relationship a pregnancy would’t be such a shock after all. There also appears no discussion about whether these young people had protection or used it, or what type and who provided it? Why is that not an important enough facet of the story to focus on? It could only help send the message that there are no guarantees and always that chance that even with protection, there are risks. Boundaries again play a part in this particular case because not only did Lynne not provide any, but there was also an older sister, incredibly troubled and ridiculously famous, shirking all decency in front of the entire world. Losing her children, behaving in a way that could only be seen as psychologically volatile, and big sister Britney Spears never knew a boundary she didn’t obscenely cross.
Teenagers need to learn through actions about consequences. They must know that an action may have a positive or negative reaction and this fact should come as no surprise by the time a kid is in their teens. There is plenty of argument about punishment, and I am not sure where I stand on this globally. Yet parents must define consequences for their children with consistency.
This brings me to the adolescent’s desperate need for consistency from their parents. They need to understand clearly what their actions will lead to every time. It seems as though parents are afraid to provide consistent consequences because they “feel bad” or it seems they fear their kid’s reactions. If parents allow kids to turn the tables and assume the position of authority, how can they be blamed for their inevitable transgressions? There are parents and there are children. Parents can not be mistaken for “friends”; they must never stop parenting in a consistent and committed fashion.
This brings us to commitment to our children and to parenting. This commitment I describe is a life long, full time job parent’s take on when they bring a child into this world. They must commit to setting boundaries, parenting with consistency and establishing consequences. They must enforce this on a daily basis without fail. Does this sound like a Herculean task? Perhaps it is at times and I by no means wish to imply that parenting in this era is easy or terrain that is well traveled. Yet the alternative, as we have so clearly been shown again and again in the tabloids, and stories of tragic lost kids doing unthinkable things almost daily by the media, can’t possibly be ignored. There has to be a better way to guide our youth, than by the examples I have shared. Without a doubt the answer is parents, parenting, and society’s willingness to see some changes in the way adolescents are perceived and accept them so as to help them.
There is hope for both the parents and our youth. I ask you then; will you make the commitment before that hope is extinguished? I think our kids are worth it. It is up to all of us to convince them of their worth, through guidance, patience and setting a reasonable example.
Sources sited:
- http://www.ok-magazine.com/ Jamie Lynn Spears Says She's Pregnant
Dec 18, 2007
- www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/fashion/16meangirls.html When the Bullies Turned Faceless by Christopher Maag. December 16, 2007
http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/
Copyright ©2007 The Advice Girl
Affair of the Lips: Scientific America article.
Scientific American Mind - January 31, 2008
Affairs of the Lips
Researchers are revealing hidden complexities behind the simple act of kissing, which relays powerful messages to your brain, body and partner
By Chip Walter
When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.
Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.
Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks.
Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species.
Satisfying Hunger
Whatever else is going on when we kiss, our evolutionary history is embedded within this tender, tempestuous act. In the 1960s British zoologist and author Desmond Morris first proposed that kissing might have evolved from the practice in which primate mothers chewed food for their young and then fed them mouth-to-mouth, lips puckered. Chimpanzees feed in this manner, so our hominid ancestors probably did, too. Pressing outturned lips against lips may have then later developed as a way to comfort hungry children when food was scarce and, in time, to express love and affection in general. The human species might eventually have taken these proto-parental kisses down other roads until we came up with the more passionate varieties we have today.
Silent chemical messengers called pheromones could have sped the evolution of the intimate kiss. Many animals and plants use pheromones to communicate with other members of the same species. Insects, in particular, are known to emit pheromones to signal alarm, for example, the presence of a food trail, or sexual attraction.
Whether humans sense pheromones is controversial. Unlike rats and pigs, people are not known to have a specialized pheromone detector, or vomeronasal organ, between their nose and mouth [see “Sex and the Secret Nerve,” by R. Douglas Fields; Scientific American Mind, February/March 2007]. Nevertheless, biologist Sarah Woodley of Duquesne University suggests that we might be able to sense pheromones with our nose. And chemical communication could explain such curious findings as a tendency of the menstrual cycles of female dormitory mates to synchronize or the attraction of women to the scents of T-shirts worn by men whose immune systems are genetically compatible with theirs. Human pheromones could include androstenol, a chemical component of male sweat that may boost sexual arousal in women, and female vaginal hormones called copulins that some researchers have found raise testosterone levels and increase sexual appetite in men.
If pheromones do play a role in human courtship and procreation, then kissing would be an extremely effective way to pass them from one person to another. The behavior may have evolved because it helps humans find a suitable mate—making love, or at least attraction, quite literally blind.
We might also have inherited the intimate kiss from our primate ancestors. Bonobos, which are genetically very similar to us (although we are not their direct descendants), are a particularly passionate bunch, for example. Emory University primatologist Frans B. M. de Waal recalls a zookeeper who accepted what he thought would be a friendly kiss from one of the bonobos, until he felt the ape’s tongue in his mouth!
Good Chemistry
Since kissing evolved, the act seems to have become addictive. Human lips enjoy the slimmest layer of skin on the human body, and the lips are among the most densely populated with sensory neurons of any body region. When we kiss, these neurons, along with those in the tongue and mouth, rocket messages to the brain and body, setting off delightful sensations, intense emotions and physical reactions.
Of the 12 or 13 cranial nerves that affect cerebral function, five are at work when we kiss, shuttling messages from our lips, tongue, cheeks and nose to a brain that snatches information about the temperature, taste, smell and movements of the entire affair. Some of that information arrives in the somatosensory cortex, a swath of tissue on the surface of the brain that represents tactile information in a map of the body. In that map, the lips loom large because the size of each represented body region is proportional to the density of its nerve endings.
Kissing unleashes a cocktail of chemicals that govern human stress, motivation, social bonding and sexual stimulation. In a new study, psychologist Wendy L. Hill and her student Carey A. Wilson of Lafayette College compared the levels of two key hormones in 15 college male-female couples before and after they kissed and before and after they talked to each other while holding hands. One hormone, oxytocin, is involved in social bonding, and the other, cortisol, plays a role in stress. Hill and Wilson predicted that kissing would boost levels of oxytocin, which also influences social recognition, male and female orgasm, and childbirth. They expected this effect to be particularly pronounced in the study’s females, who reported higher levels of intimacy in their relationships. They also forecast a dip in cortisol, because kissing is presumably a stress reliever.
But the researchers were surprised to find that oxytocin levels rose only in the males, whereas it decreased in the females, after either kissing or talking while holding hands. They concluded that females must require more than a kiss to feel emotionally connected or sexually excited during physical contact. Females might, for example, need a more romantic atmosphere than the experimental setting provided, the authors speculate. The study, which Hill and Wilson reported in November 2007 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, revealed that cortisol levels dropped for both sexes no matter the form of intimacy, a hint that kissing does in fact reduce stress.
To the extent that kissing is linked to love, the act may similarly boost brain chemicals associated with pleasure, euphoria and a motivation to connect with a certain someone. In 2005 anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University and her colleagues reported scanning the brains of 17 individuals as they gazed at pictures of people with whom they were deeply in love. The researchers found an unusual flurry of activity in two brain regions that govern pleasure, motivation and reward: the right ventral tegmental area [see illustration on next page] and the right caudate nucleus. Addictive drugs such as cocaine similarly stimulate these reward centers, through the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Love, it seems, is a kind of drug for us humans.
Kissing has other primal effects on us as well. Visceral marching orders boost pulse and blood pressure. The pupils dilate, breathing deepens and rational thought retreats, as desire suppresses both prudence and self-consciousness. For their part, the participants are probably too enthralled to care. As poet e. e. cummings once observed: “Kisses are a better fate / than wisdom.”
Litmus Test
Although a kiss may not be wise, it can be pivotal to a relationship. “One dance,” Alex “Hitch” Hitchens says to his client and friend in the 2005 movie Hitch, “one look, one kiss, that’s all we get ... one shot, to make the difference between ‘happily ever after’ and, ‘Oh? He’s just some guy I went to some thing with once.’ ”
Can a kiss be that powerful? Some research indicates it can be. In a recent survey Gallup and his colleagues found that 59 percent of 58 men and 66 percent of 122 women admitted there had been times when they were attracted to someone only to find that their interest evaporated after their first kiss. The “bad” kisses had no particular flaws; they simply did not feel right—and they ended the romantic relationship then and there—a kiss of death for that coupling.
The reason a kiss carries such weight, Gallup theorizes, is that it conveys subconscious information about the genetic compatibility of a prospective mate. His hypothesis is consistent with the idea that kissing evolved as a courtship strategy because it helps us rate potential partners.
From a Darwinian perspective, sexual selection is the key to passing on your genes. For us humans, mate choice often involves falling in love. Fisher wrote in her 2005 paper that this “attraction mechanism” in humans “evolved to enable individuals to focus their mating energy on specific others, thereby conserving energy and facilitating mate choice—a primary aspect of reproduction.”
According to Gallup’s new findings, kissing may play a crucial role in the progression of a partnership but one that differs between men and women. In a study published in September 2007 Gallup and his colleagues surveyed 1,041 college undergraduates of both sexes about kissing. For most of the men, a deep kiss was largely a way of advancing to the next level sexually. But women were generally looking to take the relationship to the next stage emotionally, assessing not simply whether the other person would make a first- rate source of DNA but also whether he would be a good long-term partner.
“Females use [kissing] … to provide information about the level of commitment if they happen to be in a continuing relationship,” Gallup told the BBC in September. The locking of lips is thus a kind of emotional barometer: the more enthusiastic it is, the healthier the relationship.
Because women need to invest more energy in producing children and have a shorter biological window in which to reproduce, they need to be pickier about whom they choose for a partner—and they cannot afford to get it wrong. So, at least for women, a passionate kiss may help them choose a mate who is not only good at fathering children but also committed enough to stick around and raise them.
That said, kissing is probably not strictly necessary from an evolutionary point of view. Most other animals do not neck and still manage to produce plenty of offspring. Not even all humans kiss. At the turn of the 20th century Danish scientist Kristoffer Nyrop described Finnish tribes whose members bathed together but considered kissing indecent. In 1897 French anthropologist Paul d’Enjoy reported that the Chinese regard mouth-to-mouth kissing to be as horrifying as many people deem cannibalism to be. In Mongolia some fathers do not kiss their sons. (They smell their heads instead.)
In fact, up to 10 percent of humanity does not touch lips, according to human ethology pioneer Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, now head of the Max-Planck-Society Film Archive of Human Ethology in Andechs, Germany, writing in his 1970 book, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns. Fisher published a similar figure in 1992. Their findings suggest that some 650 million members of the human species have not mastered the art of osculation, the scientific term for kissing; that is more than the population of any nation on earth except for China and India.
Lopsided Love
For those cultures that do kiss, however, osculation conveys additional hidden messages. Psychologist Onur Güntürkün of the Ruhr-University of Bochum in Germany recently surveyed 124 couples kissing in public places in the U.S., Germany and Turkey and found that they tilted their heads to the right twice as often as to the left before their lips touched. Right-handedness cannot explain this tendency, because being right handed is four times more common than is the act of kissing on the right. Instead Güntürkün suspects that right-tilted kissing results from a general preference that develops at the end of gestation and in infancy. This “behavioral asymmetry” is related to the lateralization of brain functions such as speech and spatial awareness.
Nurture may also influence our tendency to tilt to the right. Studies show that as many as 80 percent of mothers, whether right-handed or left-handed, cradle their infants on their left side. Infants cradled, face up, on the left must turn to the right to nurse or nuzzle. As a result, most of us may have learned to associate warmth and security with turning to the right.
Some scientists have proposed that those who tilt their heads to the left when they kiss may be showing less warmth and love than those who tilt to the right. In one theory, tilting right exposes the left cheek, which is controlled by the right, more emotional half of the brain. But a 2006 study by naturalist Julian Greenwood and his colleagues at Stranmillis University College in Belfast, Northern Ireland, counters this notion. The researchers found that 77 percent of 240 undergraduate students leaned right when kissing a doll on the cheek or lips. Tilting to the right with the doll, an impassive act, was nearly as prevalent among subjects as it was among 125 couples observed osculating in Belfast; they tilted right 80 percent of the time. The conclusion: right-kissing probably results from a motor preference, as Güntürkün hypothesized, rather than an emotional one.
Despite all these observations, a kiss continues to resist complete scientific dissection. Close scrutiny of couples has illuminated new complexities woven throughout this simplest and most natural of acts—and the quest to unmask the secrets of passion and love is not likely to end soon. But romance gives up its mysteries grudgingly. And in some ways, we like it like that.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (on the Web 2.0)
We have all been through a breakup and felt the inevitable pangs of pain, surges of tears and very real mourning period following the end of a relationship. In today’s world, where social networking and social media can be a significant part of many of our lives, old fashioned heartbreak can be compounded by the “internet breakup”.
Breaking up with someone with whom you shared your likes and dislikes, sent xoxo’s and matched compatibility quiz results with on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and of course the uber-popular Youtube, along with the many other social networks brings forth an entirely new set of issues. For instance, how long does one wait to remove from one’s page the comments, photos, and “gifts” (sent while in the often delusional. blissful cloud of love) that stare back and now haunt you? This person was your No. 1 spot in your top friends for heavens sake! What is one to do?
Once these are removed and the STATUS in the profile changes from any of the oh-so-charming descriptions ranging from “it’s complicated” or “in committed relationship” to “single”, what is the proper etiquette for well wishers and others who will invariably ask how you are coping, what happened and other questions that may be sincere but can burn through the screen like molten lava? What to do with the bevy of comments left to make sure you “keep your chin up”, that they are “thinking of you” and whatever other trite phrase delivered in glitter loitering in cyberspace like floating bullets in a Matrix-like freeze frame. Makes one want to pownce directly into a gaping void.
As in the traditional break up there is always the division of “friends”. The internet makes that division a blatantly public and often childish process. Do they “Defriend you?” Do you “Defriend” them? Who does what and how long until someone takes action? There is always that one first friend that is brave enough to make the friend switch. This person simply enjoys the new friendship more than the original friendship, yet inevitably puts themselves into the center of what may turn into a battle of loyalties, criticism and of course the unbearable insult of being Defriended (they also risk negative posts and g-d knows what from the slighted party). These friends that once felt Linkdin may experience the pain of being blocked, ignored or even… dare I say… spammed.
So as you sit there and ponder the thought “OMG” this could happen to me and your heart goes all a twitter, feeling like drinking a tumblr of whatever is readily available in the house, I ask you, what are the new rules governing this era of internet everything? How should this go down and how can you emerge relatively unscathed from all the added remnants now gathering in the cloud? How does one go from being the couple of Web 2.0 to …Web no.0?”
I hereby offer a few initial suggestions and I am sure I will come up with many more, but I need to know what you, the techlover, thinks. Perhaps together we can come up with some basic framework for keeping our net presence intact as we navigate the treacherous online break up?
Rules of Disengagement for Internet-related break ups
1. Do not post a breakup blog explaining the gory details. Such things should be private, even in today’s voyeuristic world.
2. Removal of ex should be done gradually. i.e. they did not disappear from the face of the earth, just perhaps from your life or more visibly, your vlog. This should be adhered to in order to avoid the inevitable onslaught of queries about your separation. Do it for the other person, if not for yourself.
3. Do not post new pictures of yourself with an ex, a new whatever or overtly salacious images in an attempt to inflict additional pain on your ex (no mater how much you think you hate them).4. It is not recommended posting hourly, self-involved mood updates that will not only indulge the voyeurism of others, but cheapen the anguish you both feel. In a nutshell, don’t twit a twitter.
5. While sending angry emails/IM’s in the wake of your break up, do not digg yourself a hole you cannot climb out of. This means that words on a screen are forever. Permanent. Nothing is ever truly erased from the web. So pick your jabs wisely and don’t stumbleupon your own immature cruelty.
6. Do not badmouth your ex. It is beneath you.
7. Avoid “tracking” your ex’s web activity. This can only lead to obsession and worse, pathos.
8. Do not refer in any way to your suddenly, even remarkable renewed sex drive, virility, or promiscuity. This is so far beneath you as to be found somewhere deep in the Earth’s mantle.
9. Take a break from social media. We all could use one.
10. Eat, drink, be merry and do not let the bad experience disillusion you as to the viability of another Web-based relationship - we all benefit from social media, both platonic-socially, and if we are careful and a bit lucky, we may fall for another techie again, with markedly better results.
Happiness is...
When our fore father's were writing what would become one of the most important and controversial documents framing societal mores so to speak, they obviously believed that "happiness" was an important factor by including;
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," one of the most famous phrases in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and seen as part of the Bill of Rights, namely, these three aspects are listed among the "inalienable rights" of man.
It seems in this time of political turmoil, an ongoing war in Iraq and the economy stressing out just about everyone, the subject of "happiness" is being discussed and dissected more than ever.
Time magazine devoted an issue to The New Science of Happiness.
The British BBC television kicked off a six part series on the subject this week;
"The series looks at the newest research from around the world to find out what could it be that makes us happy.
We all want to be happy but the problem has always been that you can't measure happiness.
Happiness has always been seen as too vague a concept, as Lord Layard, Professor of Economics at the LSE and author of "Happiness - lessons from a new science" points out.
"There is a problem with the word happiness.
"When you use the word happy, it often has the sort of context of balloons floating up into the sky or something frivolous."
Now scientists say they can actually measure happiness.
Neuro-scientists are measuring pleasure. They suggest that happiness is more than a vague concept or mood; it is real. "
Clearly "happiness", it's meaning and importance differs individually. The following are some fascinating and revealing quotes about the subject from writer's, philosophers and other colorful characters I found worth sharing:
- I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy. ~Franz Kafka
- If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time. ~Edith Wharton
- Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
- This is my "depressed stance." When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this. ~Charlie Brown
- You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. ~Camus
- There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.~Carl Jung .
Obviously there are divergent views of the concept of "happiness." It seems to me that we are so busy worrying about "happiness" and attaining it that perhaps we are missing the point all together. With that said, I want to know what "happiness," the word or idea mean to you? Are you happy? Do you care? Either way, feel free to share your thoughts, I look forward to exploring this further and maybe even learning something about myself in the process. Have a "happy" day.
Copyright ©2008
