I found a few ideas from the two readings assigned this week that were similar in a way to those discovered from the grant study. In short, the grant study showed that love is the key to happiness. Warm, loving relationships in an individual’s life led to overall happiness, especially in retrospect during the later years. In the Ted Talk, Yann del’Aglio defines love as our desire to be desired. We all have the freedom to value things, but everyone else has those same freedoms, consequentially everyone is aspiring to be valued. He describes it as a race for seduction, and that we all are essentially victims of seduction capital and labeling ourselves with worth. If one becomes too consumed in this perfection driven seduction capital world, then he may become one who never finds love. Yann claims that to be able to hold back our craving for value, we must understand that we’re all worthless. In loving each others weaknesses, we can find true love, and not loneliness. In the grant study, as the men involved grew older and their relationships got stronger, they found that they were happier. It took many of life’s obstacles for the men to reach a point of sustained happiness. I feel as if they had to experience life to fully appreciate and understand happiness through connections and love, rather than personal gain or status. This relates to the ted talk speech because they needed to be able to understand their worthlessness and find happiness in what they did have, instead of looking for perfect. No matter the pain suffered through life, it can always get better, and in the study life tended to get better. In love hurts, the “dark side” of love was demonstrated through jealousy. It’s natural for us as loving creatures to defend what we love. In defending what we love, we ensure that it is something that lasts, for the happiness of an honest long relationship is ideal (I guess). The power of love that brings people together is what led to the general message of happiness being found in love.
I completely agree with your connections between today’s readings and the argument stated in last week’s readings. All of the points you made were spot on and the only way to improve your stance is to provide direct quotes from the articles in order to make the reader understand that these are the actual author’s words, you are just interpreting those words and connecting the meaning to other pieces of work. Your point that in the grant studies, love is the key to happiness can be seen here, “…I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions – awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust(or faith)… ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery.’” In your blog you put the main ideas that Yann del’Aglio was trying to put across in his Ted talk when he says, “Another path to thinking about love may be possible. But how? How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued? Well, by becoming aware of my uselessness.” I liked how you touched on this point because it is my favorite part of the Ted talk. It explains that I order for you to love or be loved by someone else, you must realize that we are all have no value without the approval of others. By realizing this you can understand that true love comes from the appreciation of others weaknesses, which you mentioned. You pointed out the ideas made in “Love Hurts,” by analyzing the quote, “Love, arguably the most positive of all human emotions, also comes with a dark side,” which you made clear was jealously, a natural characteristic of humans but can affect a relationship if there is too little or too much.
ReplyDeleteTodays reading make alot of sense. Just be reading them i could also recall alot of things. It was interesting to see the different studies and how certain thoughts,feelings and emotion correlate with eachother. In "Love your doing it all wrong" he says "Love is the desire to be desired". I didnt really agree with that. Though every human on thos earth wants to be desired ,that is not what love is entirely. It goes much deeper than that. Love also makes you do crazy things and feel a certain way about everything. In one of the studies in "Love hurts other people", it says "The more love they felt for their partner, the more negatively they tended to evaluate these objectively attractive members of their own sex". I can totally relate, I myself have done this. Love makes people very possessive. In last weeks reading they studied if love, money and a good childhood will lead to overall happiness. All of the men's lives were either really good at first and they went through thing later or really bad and the got better. Over the message was does love result in happiness. I can atest to the fact that it does. But also depending on who's loving you and what type o love youre seeking. All of that plays a role in happiness.
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