Happiness without meaning or purpose is equivalent to a life with no meaning. What are ones purpose on this Earth if there is no meaning in their life. As a general idea, happiness is most commonly described as feeling or showing pleasure or content. What makes ones life pleasurable varies from person to person. Is there a difference between long-term happiness and momentary happiness? Can different people be happy in different aspects of their lives? The definition of happiness and meaning are extremely different. “when you ask people what makes their lives worth living, they rarely say anything about their mood. They are more likely to cite things that they find meaningful, such as their work or relationships.”(Acacia Parks). A person who genuinely appreciates life is someone whose life has a lot of meaning. These are the givers, not the takers. The selfish “takers” live lives that are solely based on things they can benefit from. These types of people will never get far in life. A meaningful life trumps a happy life every time.

Meaning can also be defined in many different ways depending on the person. Meaning is defined as something that is not directly expressed. What gives a persons life meaning is not usually out there in the open for everyone to know, that is what makes it special and worth something. “It’s important to understand that for many people, a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap; many people score jointly high (or jointly low) on the happiness and meaning measures in the study. But for many others, there is a dissonance — they feel that they are low on happiness and high on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness, but low in meaning.” (Smith 2013). Out of the two it is clear that meaning is worth more to oneself then happiness.

There is currently a show on television that can portray this kind of selfish “happiness with no meaning.” Many may not watch reality television but those that d0 would know The Real Housewives of Atlanta can be used as a prime example. The show follows some of the wealthiest women in Atlanta. The wealthy and “high class” women are followed around by cameras showing things such as the work, family, and leisure their lives consist of. Although these women seem to have everything they could ever ask for when the exterior is pulled away the deeper side is shown. No amount of money, job, object, even marriage is ever enough to keep the women happy. Every time something extravagant happens there is always mention of something more extravagant that could of happened. This TV show in itself can prove that happiness through fortune, fame, and material objects is never really happiness. In the end everyone always wants more and more to try to fill some sort of void their life has. This type of happiness is only skin deep, the deeper kind comes from meaning in ones life, something these women do not possess.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”(Grewal 2014). Without meaning life would just pass by, nothing left but materialistic memories and uneventful.

Works Cited
Grewal. “A Happy Life May Not Be a Meaningful Life.” Scientific American Global RSS. N.p., 2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2015.

“Happiness.” PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2015.

” Http://search.proquest.com/docview/1534304114?pq-origsite=summon. N.p., 8 June 2014. Web. Feb. 2015.
Smith, Emily Esfahani. “Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 01 Aug. 2013. Web. 03 Mar. 2015

Training is the New Torture

When we attend circuses or zoos to see all the beautiful animals and admire them we think of just that. We gaze at their beauty falling more in love with the animals themselves. Little do we know that attending zoos or circuses is actually hurting the animals. We see the caged animal calm and docile, that is not how they are born to act in the wild. While we are stuck gazing at the beautiful animals we rarely consider how they got to be so docile. Zoo and circus animals are trained using abusive tactics to become that docile. Elephants are broken to perform a certain way for the circuses. If we thought of going to see broken animals in a show, instead of beautiful majestic creatures, it would not be an enjoyable show.

To most training is thought of in a positive light. For instance, when you train a dog you positively reinforce them to go to the bathroom outside. Dog trainers stand behind the idea of positive reinforcement. They explain it as, “trainers who use positive reinforcement use rewards to encourage the dog to repeat a specific behavior. Rewards can be treats, affection or a toy. As soon as the dog does the desired behavior, the reward needs to be given” (Jorgensen 2015). The dog trainers praise the dog with love and affection when they do something correctly. With elephants training is extremely negative all the time. Owners bring a wild animal into the domestic lifestyle, the elephants are not performing any wrong behavior within their nature. Even when the Elephant correctly performs a trick they are not praised. Elephants are only punished when not performing correctly. Elephant trainers shine a whole new light on the term training.

In order to hold a successful circus show or zoo the elephants have to endure an extensive amount of pain and suffering. If elephants have to go through all that pain to be considered “trained” for the shows they are not being trained they are being tortured. They are taken away from their homeland, ripped from their mothers, isolated, and physically injured. Those are forms of torture to get the animals to perform the way the circus or zoos want them to perform. Howard Chua-Eoan comments on the training in his article The Elephants Take A Bow, “What more and more people saw as the years went by– was the use of bullhooks. To keep the elephants marching in single file up to the park, trainers whacked them with the ugly metal talons” (Chua-Eoan 2015). This torture does not benefit the animal or make the animal a better elephant in any way shape or form, it in fact injures the elephants. By training, or torturing the animals in this way it takes away from what makes them beautiful and what we admire so much, their habitat, compassion, wild, and free animals.

Recently the owner of the Ringling Bros., Kenneth Feld, released the elephants would be eliminated from all circus shows by 2018. Them removing the acts is a way of them acknowledging the wrong they have done to these innocent animals. When Feld was asked about the removal this was his comment, “When we did so, we knew we would play a critical role in saving the endangered Asian elephants for future generations, given how few Asian elephants are left in the wild. …This decision was not easy, but it is in the best interest of our company, our elephants and our customers” (Jones 2015). From his statement above, Kenneth Feld shows remorse for the shrinking elephant population. His comment hints that the elephants from the show die from being “trained”, contributing the the endangered elephants.

Many come to these zoos and circuses for a happy and peaceful outing. Supporting these organizations are only hurting the animals which we go to admire. Little do we know the torture and abuse these animals are put through just to benefit the zoo or circus owners. The people that can recognize what trauma the animals are put through are the ones that realize the misuse of the word; when the owners say they “train” the animals, it can be better said as torturing. Admiring elephants when they are forcibly in an environment that is not natural is not healthy for the elephants. What is better, is to admire the animal when it is in a healthy, non-abusive, and loved environment, where they are happy, in the wild.

Works Cited

Chua-Eoan, Howard. “The Elephants Take A Bow.” Bloomberg Businessweek 1 Mar. 2015. Print.

Jones, Charisse. “Ringling Bros. Eliminating Elephant Acts.” USA Today. Gannett, 5 Mar. 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.

Jorgenson, Amy. “Positive Reinforcement & Negative Reinforcement for Dog Training.” Dog Care. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.

I’m from Home

In African-Americans the concept of group identity is more related to family origin than to the place of birth and the contribution of the African-American group in American history. The United States was build by immigrants; therefore, according to Aisha Harris in her article  “Where I’m From,” it is usual to find kids saying that their grandparents “had come to America at some point from Ireland, or Italy, or Greece.” Nevertheless, we do not label those kids as Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans or Grecian-Americans, but as White. Unlike White kids with foreign descents, Black kids are labeled with their ancestral origin by calling the Black kids African-Americans.

A lot of African-Americans cannot relate to their ancestry from Africa because, as stated by Harris, their ancestors “were brought here against their will and any records of their origins had long since been lost.” Therefore, most African-Americans are just Americans or Black. According to Harris, she is African, genetically speaking, because her father took an ancestry DNA test that traced his roots to Nigeria. Nevertheless, Harris does not consider herself “Nigerian-American, or even African-American. Where I’m from is America—who I am is a black American.”

African-Americans should not be identified with their ancestral origins because the culture of Blacks from Africa is different from the culture of Blacks from America. Some Black Americans do not speak the same language as Africans from the same place of their ancestors. Examples to follow are the Caribbean islands, which mostly are composed of people of ancestry from Europe and Africa; however, after mixing and lost on the track of the origin of their ancestry, everyone is called the same. for instance, Cubans are not Cubans of African descent or Cubans of European descent, but Cubans.

Nicholas Payton in his article called “I Ain’t African-American, I’m Black: Nicholas Payton,” provides his definition of an African-American. According to Payton, “Anyone who moves to America from Africa and receives U.S. citizenship is African-American.” He is black because “Black, like White, is not a skin color, it’s a term of cultural identification. It [identity] has to do with how you are perceived in this world and where you fit in. Being African-American is a label, being Black has to do with acceptance.” Additionally, Payton implies that is not necessary to be a descendant of slaves in the United States to be African-American, that indeed is possible to be White and be an African-American. People who come from Africa and become citizens of The United States are the real African-Americans. Payton explains that the actress Charlize Theron is an African-American who is White but comes from Africa, Moreover, Payton makes the comparison between Charlize Theron and the Black actress Viola Davis, where Charlize is more African-American than Viola Davis because Davis is only related to the American culture.

What differentiates an African-American from a Black American, according to Payton, is that Black Americans are part of the construction of the United States and have “cultural ties to slavery and the racial oppression of pre-civil rights America.” Therefore, Payton along with Morgan Freeman find the Black History Month “ridiculous” because there is not a White History Month, which by its absence implies that Black History is not “American History,” but “African-American History.”

Works Cited

Bhopal, Raj S., Migration, Ethnicity, Race, and Health in Multicultural Societies. 2nd ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford UP, 2014. 75-76. Print.

Harris, Aisha. “Why I’d Rather Be Called a Black American Than an African-American.” Slate.com. Slate, 29 July 2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2015.

Payton, Nicholas. “I Ain’t African-American, I’m Black : Nicholas Payton.” Nicholas Payton. WordPress.com, 26 Feb. 2012. Web. 01 Mar. 2015.

All right stop, Collaborate and Listen!

Egypt is a popular place for tourists from around the globe to gather. One of its largest attractions is the Great Pyramid of Giza, which also known as Khufu’s Great Pyramid. This pyramid is over 4,500 years old and is the last-standing of the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” (Lee).  There are an uncountable amount of people who will travel hundreds of miles just to ogle at this and other massive structures of nothing but decaying limestone. All of them will be frozen in time pondering the only problem with the pyramids. We must ask, how could have primitive humans erected such mass structure with the lack of modern technology and tools?  A small percentage of us won’t be able to comprehend the concept of humans creating such structure and hide behind the speculation that the builders had assistance from an “other-worldly” force, namely extraterrestrials. The rest of the spectators will be able to logically deduce the more reasonable solution to such problem. The solution that is called a work of massive collaboration.

A massive portion of our population is unaware of the importance of collaboration throughout history and in modern times. To entertain the concept we can rewind and ask, what is collaboration? Collaboration is one of the most important factors defining humanity’s existence. This tool is a crutch for past and modern architecture, engineering, research, construction, and most other fields of growth. The pyramids weren’t built by a small group of workers overnight. Khufu’s Pyramid was constructed in a matter of thirty years with a workforce of over 100,000 oppressed slaves (Krystek). Although thirty years seems a long time for even a force of 100,000 workers, we can break this down to put the construction into perspective. First, the workers weren’t paid and had little to no incentive or compensation, if anything it was the promised “freedom” upon completion of the pyramid. By this we know the workers didn’t want to do this work. To them, they were just creating an over-sized tombstone, not a wonder of the ancient world. Even this alone can’t justify the full thirty years for over 100,000 workers. Next we have to realize that each of the 2,300,000 limestone blocks weighed 2.5 tons each, which is approximately the weight of a large truck or SUV.  We also have to remember how the stones weren’t just built up from the ground where the pyramids are. Most of the stones were quarried off-site in places as far as 600-miles away! Transporting then sculpting and finally stacking 2,300,000 SUVs hundreds of miles away from which they came without the use of any mechanical lifts or assists in a matter of 30 years is impressive. This is also considering that when the base was completed each layer after was more and more work; the same progression of work is why the cap, only the top-most portion of the pyramid, took 10 years alone to perfect.

If 100,000 workers with no incentive whatsoever could pull-off such feat then imagine what 3,000,000,000 incentive-driven workers could accomplish! 3 Billions sounds like a lot, like too many people for one project. Too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup, right? Wrong! The number 3 billion comes from an estimated 3.091 billion users on the internet at any given time. Statisticians would agree that the number of users on the internet grow at a steady and linear rate or that it even follows a slow but sure exponential curve (Internet Live Stats). These numbers may seem irrelevant until it is revealed that collaboration doesn’t have to be on-site anymore. What if the Pharaoh Khnum-Khufu himself could have out-sourced his laborers, and had a workforce of 30 million (estimated population for circa 3000 BC)? The pyramids would have been completed in a matter of hours, provided it was physically possibly for 30 million people to work in such small space together without getting in the way of one another, or spoiling the soup for that matter. If only there were some way an absurdly large task-force could be set to a common goal without interfering with one-another. Oh wait, there is! It’s called the internet, and as mentioned before it has about 3 billion users workers.

Teamwork is collaboration and has been and always will be important in achieving any greater goals. Collaboration isn’t a trait unique to humans. Collaboration is a natural strategy of survival and is seen in all walks of the animal kingdom. I can reference mutually-beneficial living organisms who help each other survive (most common fish), or a pack of wild dogs who stalk and kill their prey together then share the spoils of hunt, or monkeys that have been observed working together in a laboratory environment to obtain food, or any other examples of teamwork in nature. It won’t matter where it is a reference to because collaboration is in nearly every biome, every kingdom, every genus. Collaboration is natural for a species, or a pack of said species, to survive and thrive. Humans are no exception to this rule.

This relatively new ‘mass’-collaboration has limitless applications in every field. Using the will-power, openly or subliminally, of hundreds of millions of people could benefit any cause. There are projects which use gamers’ addictions to puzzle-solving to map neurons of the brain and a strategy game where players are defending a rain-forest where the most successful strategies would be implemented in real-life to protect the actual rain-forests from poachers. If someone proposed  a really big project there are two ways he could do it: he could befriend a millionaire philanthropist who would back and financially support his goals; or he could befriend a salesman. A salesman because they would be someone with a pitch who could sell his ideas and make them appealing to the average internet user, who might just unknowingly be his next employee.

Works Cited

Krystek, Lee. “Seven Wonder of the Ancient World: Khufu’s Great Pyramid.” Seven Wonder of the Ancient World: Khufu’s Great Pyramid. Web. 1 Mar. 2015. <http://www.unmuseum.org/kpyramid.htm&gt;.

Internet Live Stats. “Internet Users” Internet Live Stats. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. <http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/;.