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 |   Second blog -- answers to an ocean of prompts |
 "Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself." CHARLIE CHAPLIN  Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. David Whyte        This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts. |
| Prompt: Can we ever have too much of a good thing? A bad thing? Is there really a healthy balance? --- This is a speculative prompt, which calls forth a highly personal answer from each person. In addition, a healthy balance depends on who the person is and what he considers to be a good or a bad thing. As an example, in fastcompany.com, on 12/3/19, this was the headline: “AI is moving too fast, and that’s a good thing This rapid rate of innovation gives us all the chance to gut-check what we really want out of this technology—while we still have time to affect its course.” As emotion detection and facial recognition are two of the features in AI, there may be some people who think AI is a bad thing, unless if you ask DeepMind and many technological and commercial companies that are already in the process of trying to adapt AI technology to their needs. Can there be a healthy balance? I don’t think so. If you ask me, I welcome any progress or any attempt at progress in every area. A so-called healthy balance, in this case, would hurt the progress of technology. I believe this is one of those things we’ll learn to get a good use of only by trial and error. Accordingly, a good, bad, or healthy balance in anything depends on each person’s individual assessment. |
| Prompt: "As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others." Audrey Hepburn What are your thoughts about this? ----- Helping oneself comes easily. We are all conditioned and possibly programmed even before birth to take care of number one. This is sometimes called the survival instinct. Helping others comes later. Some help those who have the same troubles or illnesses they or people they care about are suffering from. This, I call, helping through sympathetic sorrow. Nothing wrong with it, but it still refers back to one’s own self. Some volunteering organizations and charities try to entice people into helping by saying or implying that:  Helping others feels good. You’ll find a sense of purpose. You can forget your own troubles and find happiness through helping. Volunteering is a social activity. You won’t feel lonely. If you help others you may live longer. Helping others is a life-altering experience you need for your own growth.Now, when you think about all these reasons, don’t they point to one’s own self, again? Then, maybe just about everything reverts back to one’s own self. I think the wish to help others should come from within oneself, through the simply feeling of empathy. Empathy is easier to feel toward individuals. In such a case, one’s helping should be subtle as to not make the other person feel indebted. Also, talking about myself, I was raised to take care of what I did through the act of living. For example, when I stood up from a sitting position, I had to make sure the chair was pushed in or the cushions smoothed back to their original position. And if I were to see something messy, it would be a good idea to try to fix it. This is because we live in a world where we have to make sure it stays livable for others because we are all one family: The human family. Whether the good we do comes back to us or not. |
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But good job quickly redirecting back to the positive things.