Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Obesity, Health, and Body Image



Saturday, February 23, 2013

How Why This Way Has Helped Me See Clearly

Since I've been involved in Why This Way, I feel like I've been better able to evaluate the amount of truth in the messages around me, and have a better idea of how I want to respond. I think part of this is due to its emphasis on identifying logical fallacies. I took a class on logical fallacies when I was in college, and I thought it was really easy and obvious. But it was mostly hypothetical. Why This Way involves actively rooting out those fallacies from my own speech patterns and those of people around me, with the enforcement of the rules of communication in meetings. How has this helped me in real life?

There are a lot of common speech patterns that are sort of ingrained in society, in which people say things that aren't entirely true, such as exaggerations and over-generalizations. And it's so normal to do it - I've always been aware that it's common, and I expect people to exaggerate and over-generalize, but I didn't realize until recently how much skewed thinking and reasoning can result from it. It generates racism, and other forms of discrimination. It perpetuates ideas about people, where if people don't fit with them, they might feel like something is wrong with them. I think there's nothing wrong with a little figure-of-speech exaggeration like "it's hot as blazes outside" but I think the problem comes when people take or present over-generalizations as truth. Then an idea can enter the consciousness of society such as "Men only want sex, and everything they do for women is so that they can get some."

Being involved in Why This Way has helped me identify potentially harmful over-generalizations, and I respond to them by saying things like "I don't think that's always true," and/or presenting a counterexample if I have one. I've found that usually people will agree, if they think about it, that their generalization isn't entirely true.

Another thing that I often hear is people ascribing motives to other people. I believe that no human being knows better than you what your motives are. In the past, if I had people tell me what they thought my motives were, I might have believed them, and internalized it. But now if someone tries to tell me something like, "you might be resisting this activity out of a subconscious fear of thus and such," I can be like, "I don't think I am. I think I have other reasons why I don't want to do it." And I think I've also become more aware of my motivations, on some level.

All in all, I think I've developed a clearer ability to filter the ideas around me in terms of their levels of truthfulness, subjectivity, healthiness, and whether they're ideas that I want to associate with. I think I have a better ability to protect myself against manipulation and having ideas pushed on me that I don't want.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The Veto Vote




Friday, November 2, 2012

Why Are You Voting?




Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Why I Think Celebrity Fandom, Even to Some Extremes, Can Be Healthy

This is a tricky topic for me to write about, because I think there's something about celebrity fandom that a lot of people just don't experience and don't understand, and it's hard to communicate what exactly the appeal is. Celebrities are just people. I believe that wholeheartedly. I believe in treating them with respect, just like everyone else. I don't believe that they're any more valuable than anyone else. So how does it make sense that I get so crazy-excited over one little interaction with my favorite band?

When I say I think fandom can be healthy to some extremes, I do mean some. There are definitely fine lines that lead from what I consider healthy fandom, to unheathy, even destructive obsession. When have you crossed those lines? Here are just a few characteristics that I would consider to be unhealthy:

  • If your obsession with celebrities interferes with or damages your relationships with friends, or if it interferes with your ability to do what you want to do in your life.
  • If you do things that you wouldn't otherwise do because it would go against your values, for the sake of your obsession with celebrities.
  • If you don't have the celebrities' best interests in mind, and start doing things to them in the direction of stalking them, stealing from them, or intruding in their lives in some unwanted way.
  • If you gossip about things that are very personal to them.
  • If you have an inaccurate perspective about your closeness with the celebrity. For instance, if you think you have a relationship with them that you don't actually have, or if you think you know more about them than you actually do.
  • If you are continuously frustrated that you can't be closer to them.

A lot of these things have to do with the idea that celebrities are just people, so I like to treat them with the same kind of respect that I treat my friends with, and not treat them like objects.

Now I want to get into why I think celebrity fandom can be a good thing. And part of it just has to do with my observations about my mentality about life when I am in awe of a celebrity or group of them. For one thing, it sparks my creativity more intensely than anything else, to the point where I can barely keep from expressing it. The kind of creativity that it inspires is different from other kinds. It feels more driven, less aimless, and less self-centered.

The whole experience of fandom feels both humbling and awesome at the same time. It's like being in love sometimes, but it's different from being in love with someone in your own peer group, in that there is a different dynamic and set of expectations. If my friend from school found out that I had posters of him all over my wall, it would be a little weird, wouldn't it? But maybe it's just a cultural difference. With celebrities, it's more socially acceptable to be crazy about them.

I've expressed this to people before, but I think (especially since I'm single, probably) I have a lot of unfocused admiration, and there are a lot of situations where I don't feel like it's appropriate to express it to people. I actually sometimes think that I wish people were more openly affectionate and appreciative of one another without having as much stigma about jealousy and perceived romantic intentions. And I feel like the kinds of things that I want to express to people who I really appreciate are more accepted, and not taken too seriously, when the targets of admiration are celebrities.

So why do I think it's healthy? Because I think expressing appreciation in excessive volumes if we feel like it is good for us. I think it exercises our overall capacity for loving each other, especially if we don't want or expect anything in return. I like the idea that someone can allow themselves to get extremely excited over a simple interaction with someone.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

We Are Building A Religion

Within the last year I became involved in starting a new religion, Why This Way. I was hesitant to call it a religion for a few reasons. One of them is that it isn't what I think of as a religion: it isn't a theology. But it is a system of beliefs about other things. Another reason was that I think saying that we're starting a new religion might raise red flags for people that I know in my church. Like, if you start your own religion, you'll be worshiping yourselves. But it's just a matter of definition. If I said we're starting a new organization to promote health in every aspect of life, I don't think it would sound bad.

What's the point of Why This Way? It's always hard for me to sum up, because it is about every aspect of life. It started with Alex's vision, and It's not something I would have thought up on my own. Why? Because it seems too obvious. Just looking at our page of core beliefs, I would have thought that some of these things aren't even worth mentioning. But I think that's because they were already so ingrained into the way that I think, and I interact with a community of people who I perceive to think that way too. I guess it sometimes doesn't occur to me that it's not like that everywhere, and the more I've been involved in this, the more I've been able to identify things that don't fit with these beliefs, and don't seem right. Especially in the media.

We established (and are still establishing) our beliefs by coming to a consensus about what we think is important for a healthy and functional society. I've been asked before whether the idea that we don't mention God means that we're humanist or naturalist, but it doesn't mean that. We don't mention God because we know that people have different beliefs about God and we only deal with things that we can have a consensus about within our belief system. We're not here to replace other religions, but to exist along with them, and maybe influence them in positive ways. We also want to create an environment of respect for each other's personal beliefs about God.

One thing that's unique about Why This Way is that the first things we established were about the organization's decision-making process. This is because we often see organizations doing things in their governments that don't seem to make sense according to their values, and we want to avoid that as much as possible. We establish things by consensus, and we have rules of communication to encourage respectful dialog and minimize escalation of conflict. Although we have our set of core beliefs, the rules of communication are the first things we established, and our beliefs sort of grew from them. So although we are about health and holism in general, I guess our religion is very focused on respectful communication, and the idea that a lot more can be accomplished by people actually listening to each other and attempting to build a consensus than people might think. We want to bring that idea into as many areas of life as possible, like political debates, advertising, and education.