In his TED Talk, Alain De Botton right off the bat, explains that we as humans have an idea of our individual lives. We picture how our career is going to be, how our family will act, how much money we will make, and so on. Until our visions of the future come in contact with reality, and anxiety about our lives becomes overwhelming. An example of a real world experience according to De Botton is getting asked the question, "What do you do?". Being unsure of your life or feeling lesser than the person to you right, can cause depression and severe anxiety, which in a way is a tragedy having to do with one's emotional self.
Our society has also put pressure on doing anything you want and as much as you can in your life time. There is no limit to what you can do with your life, which puts pressure on everyone to rise up and be better than the best. With this, Botton brings up that envy is a big issue, "everybody is the same and yet they are not... the spirit of equality, combined with deep inequalities which makes for a very stressful situation". In our meritocratic society, we feel that if someone doesn't get to the top, they are losers and they deserve to be there. This means we are in the "driver's seat" of our lives, which puts terrible stress and anxiety on the people on the bottom. De Botton goes on to talk about how tragedy is different, and can be looked at in new ways by everyone. His example of this is a local tabloid making up crazy headers for stories that don't matter, or that aren't as bad as the header reads. As a society, we make up tragedies, and place tragedies on other people. We cause our own, and each other's tragedies, but that is just how our society works now.
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Tragedy, to me is having something unexpected, and horrible happen to you. It is something that harms you or a loved one that you can't control. Examples of what I personally believe to be tragic are; a terrible car accident, an unexpected family emergency, or cancer. These are a few things that I consider to be tragic. Tragedies are things that you can not control. Either during the event or the outcome of it. It isn't something that people want to have happen, or wish upon themselves or others. However this is just my view of a tragedy, which makes me think, what is a tragedy? Where do tragedies come from?
According to Wikipedia, the origins of tragedy stem from ancient Greece. It was a form of drama - human suffering, isn't that nice?- which gave the viewers pleasure. Since it is from ancient Greece, all of the famous philosophers we hear about (Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and more) have analyzed, criticized and worked on this genre. So a tragedy is a little off of what my view of it was. It is the enjoyment of watching other people have terrible things happen to them. Another version of tragedy is known as "tragedy of the commons." It is where an individual in a shared resource system, behaves contrary to the whole group to deplete or harm the resources they share. This is seen in many of the things humans do without really realizing it. We fish excessively, which depletes the amount of fish in our lakes and oceans. We don't take care of the environment as well was we could, which leads to global warming. It is also shown in politics, taxation, and other things. These topics are interesting to me. I have never thought of a tragedy in these ways before. I have always been under the impression that a tragedy is a real event that harms a person, so it was surprising to me to in out that tragedies started as a drama for people to enjoy. I also thought it was interesting that a tragedy can happen to a large group of people, because of the decisions of one person. To go with that idea, it made me realize that humans do that on a daily basis, whether we notice it or not. Overall this opened my eyes to tragedies, and I am excited to work on them more in class. |
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