"Your Life on Earth" Personal Philosophy Project
Project Description
The point of this project was to think about what makes you happy, gives your life meaning or the purpose of human existence and make a project that goes deeper into one (or more) of those questions. I chose to do my project about how music gives my life meaning and how I embrace it. My project was seeking to answer the question “What gives your life meaning?” which is why I chose the theme of music because music plays a big part in my day to day life and has for some time. I chose to focus on the parts of music that are specifically special to me like my favorite band, how I enjoy listening to it, and what I listen to and why. I ended up going more in depth into a specific song by my favorite band (through an art piece) and how music plays a role in my life (through a poem).
New Insights
One thing that I’ve thought about for a long time but had the opportunity to explore further through this project is how different people have different tastes in music. I think it’s really interesting how there can be one group of people that hate a specific type of music and another group that loves it and I’m interested in what makes them think that way. As I thought about that during this project, I realized that it could be translated to a larger scale of recreational activities, professions, etc. Everyone has their own unique thing in the world that gives their life meaning and I think it’s fascinating because they all discovered these things through different means.
Our study of philosophy and ethics has changed my thinking around relationships as well. I understood that relationships like your friends or romantic relationships are a great thing to have and make your life more diverse but I had no idea that they scientifically make you happier and make you live longer until we watched the Ted Talk called “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness”. This Ted Talk was about a study on a bunch of different men that watched them throughout their lives as they aged. The study asked the men questions about their lives and concluded that the men with more friends and positive relationships were happier and had more meaning in their lives. I feel like if more people heard things like this, the “American dream” would change from trying to acquire as much money as you can get your hands on to trying to form as many positive relationships as you can. I think that’s a much better and healthier outlook on life than what most people have today.
Further Questions and Intellectual Work Left to Do
Where do your intellectual quandaries go from here? What do you wonder about now that you may not have before? What questions do you still need to answer for yourself. If you like, include a list of roughly 4-6 questions this project sparked for you about yourself, life, or the human place in the world/universe.
I am now left wondering if there are some things in life that give more meaning to your life than others. If there are specific things like positive relationships that make you happier, then should I just pursue those things for the majority of my life? Should I try to find my own unique things that give my life meaning or should I just go with what the studies tell me I need? With the vastness of the universe and all the things in this world, I’m left wondering what it is I should be doing to make my life better. Should I actively seek out things to give my life more meaning or should I just “go with the flow” and accept what I find along the way? Is there a solution to being unhappy in life, or do the ups and downs come together and you can’t have one or the other by itself? I feel like you can definitely have only unhappiness in your life and little to no joy but I don’t feel like you can be happy all the time with no sadness.
The point of this project was to think about what makes you happy, gives your life meaning or the purpose of human existence and make a project that goes deeper into one (or more) of those questions. I chose to do my project about how music gives my life meaning and how I embrace it. My project was seeking to answer the question “What gives your life meaning?” which is why I chose the theme of music because music plays a big part in my day to day life and has for some time. I chose to focus on the parts of music that are specifically special to me like my favorite band, how I enjoy listening to it, and what I listen to and why. I ended up going more in depth into a specific song by my favorite band (through an art piece) and how music plays a role in my life (through a poem).
New Insights
One thing that I’ve thought about for a long time but had the opportunity to explore further through this project is how different people have different tastes in music. I think it’s really interesting how there can be one group of people that hate a specific type of music and another group that loves it and I’m interested in what makes them think that way. As I thought about that during this project, I realized that it could be translated to a larger scale of recreational activities, professions, etc. Everyone has their own unique thing in the world that gives their life meaning and I think it’s fascinating because they all discovered these things through different means.
Our study of philosophy and ethics has changed my thinking around relationships as well. I understood that relationships like your friends or romantic relationships are a great thing to have and make your life more diverse but I had no idea that they scientifically make you happier and make you live longer until we watched the Ted Talk called “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness”. This Ted Talk was about a study on a bunch of different men that watched them throughout their lives as they aged. The study asked the men questions about their lives and concluded that the men with more friends and positive relationships were happier and had more meaning in their lives. I feel like if more people heard things like this, the “American dream” would change from trying to acquire as much money as you can get your hands on to trying to form as many positive relationships as you can. I think that’s a much better and healthier outlook on life than what most people have today.
Further Questions and Intellectual Work Left to Do
Where do your intellectual quandaries go from here? What do you wonder about now that you may not have before? What questions do you still need to answer for yourself. If you like, include a list of roughly 4-6 questions this project sparked for you about yourself, life, or the human place in the world/universe.
I am now left wondering if there are some things in life that give more meaning to your life than others. If there are specific things like positive relationships that make you happier, then should I just pursue those things for the majority of my life? Should I try to find my own unique things that give my life meaning or should I just go with what the studies tell me I need? With the vastness of the universe and all the things in this world, I’m left wondering what it is I should be doing to make my life better. Should I actively seek out things to give my life more meaning or should I just “go with the flow” and accept what I find along the way? Is there a solution to being unhappy in life, or do the ups and downs come together and you can’t have one or the other by itself? I feel like you can definitely have only unhappiness in your life and little to no joy but I don’t feel like you can be happy all the time with no sadness.
The Soundtrack of my Life
The rhythm pulses from inside
Let the beat be the guide
Skiing down the slopes in Telluride
3rd grade at the tech center
Taught me to be an improv inventor
The way the melody gave me pleasure
My treasure
The notes across the page meant nothing
The sound they made was stunning
Like a tree budding but with drumming
Endless possibilities in this place
A million books in a bookcase
Infinite taste throughout the human race
Countless lines of code in a database
Down in the underworld
Any track could be a pearl
Or toes curl. Give it a whirl
Consumed by the tempo
Through the sunshine and the snow
From solos I grow
Dancing with a shadow
All these cards to swap
Encouraged nonstop eavesdrop
Surfing on a desktop
Blast it from the treetops
Within, meaning is hidden away
Chicken wire beneath paper mache
Listen to the music like an x-ray
Chow down on the message because it’s gourmet
This poem is about how music became meaningful in my life from an early age and how I find meaning in it and embrace it. I start the first stanza off with something I do quite often which is ski in Telluride while listening to music. Telluride has always been a special place for me and listening to music while skiing there has always been a favorite activity of mine in the winter. I then go on to mention how I got started playing music at the tech center in a small band of 3rd graders, and how that band pushed me to become comfortable with creating my own melodies through improvisation. The next stanza reveals how I’ve never been the best at reading sheet music but that never stopped me from playing, listening to, and enjoying music. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that everybody has their own taste in music and I’ve always wanted to know how that develops in a person over time. My taste in music for example is very broad because I’ve been exposed to so many different kinds. The next two stanzas are about how every person has a different taste and that a favorite song for one person could be a terrible song to the next which I find very interesting. After that, I mention how music became a big part of my life and how I started listening to it at every opportunity I had. The next stanza is about how I have a lot of great songs I’ve discovered and collected to share with other people and how I “eavesdrop” while other people play music in order to find more songs that I like. The last stanza is about how a lot of songs have deeper meanings that you really have to either listen to the song a lot to understand or read and analyze the lyrics. I started doing this a lot more after Jessica and I talked about the messages in songs by Wu Tang and Nas and I have to say the songs I’ve studied in depth have a lot more significance than others that I just enjoy the melody of.
The rhythm pulses from inside
Let the beat be the guide
Skiing down the slopes in Telluride
3rd grade at the tech center
Taught me to be an improv inventor
The way the melody gave me pleasure
My treasure
The notes across the page meant nothing
The sound they made was stunning
Like a tree budding but with drumming
Endless possibilities in this place
A million books in a bookcase
Infinite taste throughout the human race
Countless lines of code in a database
Down in the underworld
Any track could be a pearl
Or toes curl. Give it a whirl
Consumed by the tempo
Through the sunshine and the snow
From solos I grow
Dancing with a shadow
All these cards to swap
Encouraged nonstop eavesdrop
Surfing on a desktop
Blast it from the treetops
Within, meaning is hidden away
Chicken wire beneath paper mache
Listen to the music like an x-ray
Chow down on the message because it’s gourmet
This poem is about how music became meaningful in my life from an early age and how I find meaning in it and embrace it. I start the first stanza off with something I do quite often which is ski in Telluride while listening to music. Telluride has always been a special place for me and listening to music while skiing there has always been a favorite activity of mine in the winter. I then go on to mention how I got started playing music at the tech center in a small band of 3rd graders, and how that band pushed me to become comfortable with creating my own melodies through improvisation. The next stanza reveals how I’ve never been the best at reading sheet music but that never stopped me from playing, listening to, and enjoying music. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that everybody has their own taste in music and I’ve always wanted to know how that develops in a person over time. My taste in music for example is very broad because I’ve been exposed to so many different kinds. The next two stanzas are about how every person has a different taste and that a favorite song for one person could be a terrible song to the next which I find very interesting. After that, I mention how music became a big part of my life and how I started listening to it at every opportunity I had. The next stanza is about how I have a lot of great songs I’ve discovered and collected to share with other people and how I “eavesdrop” while other people play music in order to find more songs that I like. The last stanza is about how a lot of songs have deeper meanings that you really have to either listen to the song a lot to understand or read and analyze the lyrics. I started doing this a lot more after Jessica and I talked about the messages in songs by Wu Tang and Nas and I have to say the songs I’ve studied in depth have a lot more significance than others that I just enjoy the melody of.
Deconstructing America: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Democratic experiment
This project was all about learning about the other side of an argument that you feel strongly about. The point was to learn about the other side's values and accept them as a "different truth" to our own without necessarily having to believe in them. We each chose a controversial political topic and wrote one essay as if we were for the issue and another as if we were against it while using the arguments of those sides. We also wrote an essay about our own personal thoughts without doing any research prior. Finally, each person made some kind of art piece to represent their views or what they wrote about in their essays. A lot of people's ideologies shifted throughout the course of this project due to them researching the other side and finding evidence that swayed their position.