Group Project: Social Media Addiction

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or08vsMy5gg&feature=youtu.be

Recycling is "Cool"!

There is no such thing as a ground breaking new style or fashion.  No skin we can honestly call our own.  We are but carbon copies of what society has already lived and evolved into and from.  We are a generation following the waves before us.  Tweaking the past and redefining the present as 'original' and moving on satisfied with our outcome.  The previous generation(s) justify us - disapproval fuels recycled rebelliousness; approval empowers intimate ties and an inability to be disowned.

Television commercials, magazine ads, billboards, music, movies, toys, video games, fables, and mom and dad have spoon feed children since day one: boys are superheros, girls are princesses.  That is the unedited cut.  Men should be able to do-it-all and women should be able to get-it-all!  No matter what genre, style, nitch, group or whatever a person fits into.  Guys are encouraged to attract the target mate with the ability to manipulate life and control what is and is not.  The girl are expected to attract a mate by being manipulable and sought after to please.  Society states gender roles and individuals feed off societies teachings from beginning to end.

 Gender roles are created by society.  Gender roles are accepted as the norm or the standard.  To break this expectation society has of an individual is heresy committed against society's established parameters.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs focuses on human motivations and how people choose their priorities.  Beginning at the bottom, human psychology requires a strong base of physiological need.  The need for breathing, food, water, sleep, sex, homeostasis, and excretion comes first before any other choices are made.  Following physiological needs is that of safety.  Security of: resources, mortality, family, health, property all provide motivation in making decisions.  Love and belonging is the third tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  Love and belonging encompasses friendship, family, and sexual intimacy.  Esteem, the forth tier, builds upon love and belonging moving further into self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, and respect by others.  With all other tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs solidified an individual can master self-actualization.  Within self-actualization, individuals learn to develop morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, and acceptance of facts.

Gender roles are a means for people to compare what is acceptable and what is not and how to seek society's approval in order to appeal tier three and four of Maslow's theory.  Want love and belonging?  Be a socially accepted ideology and you will have the acceptance of family, friends, significant others and you will find support and respect from others reinforcing self-esteem and confidence and circling back to give you respect for others because of others' acceptance of you.  Those to whom break gender roles can even be inclined to hide their sexual preference from public for fear of endangering tier four, three, two and possibly even tier one!  Prejudice by society does not support self-esteem when the world seems to hate thee.  Confidence is hard to hold with no support of others or from personal esteem.  Friends may be lost.  Families have been known to chastise opposing-rhetorical-genders.  If friends and family do not support an individual's choice of an opposing-gender, why should an employer be any different.  No employment equals no resources.

Gender roles are just an example of the fear that lies in the unknown.  Humanities greatest fear is also its greatest motivation.  Humans fear the unknown, but this race chases knew knowledge and understanding seduced by curiosity.

So why does our generation and the generation before us and so on choose to consistently revert to a recycled idea?  To fit in of course!  What is advertised by society is considered success by society.  And if we can fit in then happiness comes a little easier.

But who ever said society's perspective of success is correct?  Not 100% of those considered by society to be successful and happy are truely happy.  No.  Society mold is not always right for every single person.  Whatever works in your favor and finds you happiness:  that is success.

Destruction is a form of Creation

Do you have an issue fitting into these societal ideological molds?  If so, you have every opportunity to be whom you want to be.  Yes, you will be different.  No, you are not guaranteed a following of devout disciples to whom will spread your ideas across the lands and make you a legend.  Nor are you even guaranteed mere acceptance via society.  You are able to say you are true to yourself - so long as you are doing whatever you deem socially rebellious for your own spiritual gain and not social gain.  That's simply contradicting.  But yes, you have every opportunity to be whatever you want to be granted you have the will and the resources or the will to attain and manipulate the resources required.  

So the first question here today is what would you be if not a societal ideology?  The second quiz I will be talking myself through is: why do we strive to be a copy of something/someone we see as socially successful? 

Question uno:  What is there left to be if not what is already claimed?  This is like an explorer trying to find land to call his own in today's established world.  There is no longer undiscovered spans of potential living space here on Earth.  Yes, the ocean floor has not been completely mapped.  No, it is not practical living on the ocean floor a lifetime.  Just like living under an ocean of debt is impractical.  I guess a Sandy Cheeks is possible with the correct resources but let's not get into far-fetched hypotheticals, shall we?  So if each nation is a different genre of person you can be (Great Britian/hipster, Canada/hippie, Russia/goth, Japan/geek, etc.), each with its own boundaries and vast spaces to explore.  Each culture will own prodigies and disgraces alike.  Each will have a variety of choices within its distinct style.  

Today, there is a 6 billion plus human populace on Earth.  That is today.  Yesterday is the history of the human race and the countless that made names for themselves or ... did not.  But the fact of the matter is, creativity is a recycling of someone else's thought.  One man's trash is another man's treasure.  Granted, we claim a completely different spectrum of resources than yesterday's man did, but still - how can there be a new without exploring an entirely new world?  Earth has been discovered, explored and recorded.  In other words, who can you be if not socially accepted by some form or another?  Even an outcast is recognized as part of an outcast group.  Same with outlaws and sheep and future people and retrograders.  There can no longer be a "new".  Only a recycled and celebrated idea.

Beg to differ?  Please, debate this!  I loath admitting creativity is a dream or fantasy, but I have come to terms with reality and this is what I have come to recognize as the truth.  So the question comes ... why do we strive to revert into another's skin?  

Bite for Bite Evolution Ebbs Empires

We are what we eat.  Nutrients and a well-balanced diet produce a healthy, balanced body.  Fats, oils, grease, and unnecessary chemicals found in addictive attractive foods procure unbalanced fatty, oily bodies with unnecessary and unusable weight (with the exception of warmth and stored energy).  These estimations are made with the assumption all other variables are constant.

Constant is a funny word that seems to take shape as what we understand to be natural.  If something is unnatural than it is no longer constant.  Global warming is not natural.  The climate went from being a constant reliable fact of life to a variable we must account for in order to determine our future weather patterns.  The climate flows naturally when all other variables attributing to this dependent are considered consistent and reliable:  respiration, photosynthesis, decomposition, volcanic toxins, etc.  Chemical reactions within nature balance out.

The natural order becomes unbalanced when one side of the spectrum is over stimulated.  Humanity burns more fossil fuels than nature's natural tendency is and in turn the atmospheres has more carbon dioxide than the order can recycle, tipping the balance to unnatural.  Odd, we and life prospers in this natural order but we enjoy immediate gratification vs. looking beyond the "now".

But back to the "now" - today, food is no longer natural.  Corn is super grown with the most bountiful and fastest developing chemical concoctions science can manifest.  Greens decomposition is slowed ten-fold with a number of preservatives and pesticides.  Poultry, pork, turkey, and beef grow fully, massive and in half the time with hormones man-made.  Today's food is disgustingly irregular and humanity can only play God for so long before hell reaps the futures sewn by our own hand.

Remember that question: "we are what we eat"?  Today, humanity experiences the most disabilities, chronic illnesses, genetic defects, chemical in-balances within the brain (emotional, cognitive, or otherwise), sterile men and women, weakness of the body (osteoporosis, cancer, arthritis, headaches, etc.), ect, than it ever has, period.  We are unstable, man-made and untested, mutations of what humans used to be.  I shiver at the future.

Unappetizing Food for Thought

Heart disease, strokes, diabetes, several types of cancer, sleep apnoea,  Gout, and gallbladder disease derive, in large part, due to being overweight or obese.  Many concerns of weight gain bounce off the idea that weight, after a certain point, is nearly impossible to shed.  Genetics, conditions, and situations of stress or inflexibility of schedules can contribute to the already tough challenge of losing weight, but I believe it is not solely these factors that prevent the burning of fat, but instead an individual's diet.  The makeup of an individual's food determines how the food processes in the body.  The phrase, "you are what you eat," plays into effect as food break-down periods are either natural or surreal.   Organic foods begin breaking down within three to four days on average.  Preservative saturated and processed foods take far longer on average with anywhere from two to three weeks to begin decomposing.

Super Size Me - a documentary of several experiments involving McDonald's foods - shares an experiment testing the decomposition of McDonald's fast food compared to a mom-&-pop store with foods void of preservatives with the exception of the those added before the meat and potatoes were bought by the store.  The results are disturbing.

Repeated several times in the video is the idea that, "what are these foods doing inside of the consumers?"  The french fries especially are of particular interest.  Do these petrified foods decompose in us at all?  Do they break down slower or stay with us til our dying day?  If so, then my fear of overweight fellows tormented by the chase for the slimmer life is correct.  The fat is permanent because it is impossible to break down and burn.  It is fossilized fat.  Like a carbonated Hans Solo chryogenically frozen to our bellies.  

P.S.  on a personal note, I have had a run-in with one of these McDonald's french fries perfectly preserved at SIX MONTHS beneath the seat of my car.  The fry felt like a cut stone blasted with sand to give an idea of its tough, rough exterior.  The inside was the presumably no different than the exterior as there was no give.  The fry would not break down, even under excessive rubbing, squeezing and prodding.  A friend and I joked about the consumption of a such a gem only days before and the topic encompassed classes with the release of Super Size Me as a scholarly documentary.  Curiosity, in the end, got the best of me.  I ate the fossil food.  Dirty grit like that of sanded granite crushed with six month old deep frying oils and dirt overwhelmed me.  I found it impossible to swallow.  What happens when that freak of nature food is in me? What does it become?  That's all, thank you!