Labels

I realized that people like to label things and people. People feel some need to give things a label and give them some value. Think about it; everything in a store has a label. The label gives the product a price and its value. People think everything has to have some sort of worth, so they sort things by their value. People judge cars by how the look and by what they're worth. More expensive cars are more highly looking upon than cheap cars. This would not be such an issue if people didn't do the same thing to people. People have to label others for whatever reason. Everyone does it; some more than others. People always label others by what they do or what they think or what they believe. Some people place labels on people verbally. I don't think that is right. If you have an opinion of someone that is negative, you should just keep it to yourself. Why do you think that person wants to know what you think of them? Are you trying to hurt them? There is no reason to label people. We think we have to rate people by what they are worth. We always are judging people by what we think of them. Realize that I did not say we label them by what they are, but what we think they are. Sometimes you should keep your opinions to yourself. I'm guilty of labeling people, and I regret what I've done. I realized that I should keep some things to myself and not stick labels on to other people. When people put labels on each other, it negatively affects the other person. People will try to put labels on you, try to tell you who you are, and depending on how you take it you can be hurt. Don't let people label you and tell you who you are. Why do you care what they think? If people say you aren't smart, don't listen. If you know you are smart, don't listen to them. Block it out. You don't need that in your life. If you let people stick labels on you all the time, you won't know who you really are. You will be confused and disoriented by what others tell you, and then you forget who you are. And that obviously is not good. You can't let people tell you who you are and what your worth. They have no right or any reason to do that, and their opinion of you does not matter. You need to decide for yourself who you are and what you want to do with your life. Don't let others do that for you. Which leaves the question- who are you?
-Smart

Entertainment

Recently I started thinking about people's seemingly unquenchable appetite for entertainment. Contrary to most of my posts this one is not very practical as it is philosophical. I realized that in a book I read in my English class named "Brave New World" that people love escape. People seem to find that escaping reality is very enjoyable and addicting. People get addicted to drugs and alcohol because it lets them escape from reality. Why are people so pressed to find escape? This is not only in the form of drugs or alcohol though. People can find escape in the form of what is known as entertainment. We love entertainment so much, even though many people seem to agree that is usually bad for us. Take for example video games. Children love playing them, for whatever reason, but parents keep telling them that it is bad. If it is bad why do we desire it so much? Why do we as people want things that we know are not good for us? We seem to love doing things we think are not good for us. The things we find we should be doing, we don't really seem to like doing most of the time. Exercise, studying, dieting, helping the homeless, you name it. We just contradict ourselves a lot. Why are we like that? Why are humans so prone to entertainment and yet we think it's bad? Honestly I don't know the correct answer, because no one can really answer that, but I think I might have an answer. Again this is by no means the correct answer, just an interesting idea I had. I believe we humans enjoy entertainment so much because of what it allows. It allows us to escape from reality, and allows us to think about something else than our present situations. So why do we want escape? Not all humans are necessarily in bad situations so the question is fair. Even "successful" people want to be entertained. Perhaps people were made to want something that is not able to satisfied in this world, so by escaping the present world we get a taste of something that our reality could not offer. The more we are entertained, the happier we are, but no matter how much we are entertained we are never truly satisfied. I believe this is because we never truly reach that "something" that we desire. So we keep trying by continuous entertainment, but it still does not satisfy. So what is it in us that desires this mysterious thing? Why do we want something that we can't get in our world? Why do we have to escape? I think that each one of us has something greater inside us than just flesh and bone. I think each of us has what people call a soul or spirit. I believe that this spirit in us desires things that our world cannot offer to us, not even by entertainment. I believe we were made to want something more.
-Smart

Trust

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."
-Proverbs 3:5
Recently I started thinking about what trust is and why we need it. Trust means to rely on someone or on something. Trust is a very interesting idea because it is so rare to see someone fully trusting someone else. Trust is very difficult because we feel that no one is worthy of our trust, which is actually true most of the time. People are naturally flawed, and always fall short of expectations we have. So naturally, we feel as if we cannot trust other people, which is fair. However, living a life without trust is so limited. Lemme give an example; imagine a child with his father at the pool. The father is in the pool and is waiting for his son to jump in, ready to catch his son. He tells his son to jump in, and if the son trusts his dad, he will. If he doesn't trust his dad, he will miss out on the opportunity to jump in water, and may even fear jumping in water. But when he trusts that his dad will catch him, the son is able to experience the fun of jumping in water. This of course is a silly example but it makes my point; trusting others can bring you experiences you never could have otherwise. You still must bear in mind that nobody is fully worthy of your trust, because everyone falls. Even you and me. However, if you can find people who are relatively trustworthy and you learn to trust them, your life can go in new directions and can be a little more relaxed. People who do not trust many people tend to believe that the world is corrupt and not worthy. People who trust a lot of people tend to believe that people are good. Life is a balance though. People can be both bad and good. There is no one on the earth who is fully good, but also I believe no one who is fully evil. So the question is who to trust? The people who are worthy of trust are the people who have proven them self to be trustworthy. Don't make friends and automatically assume that they are worthy of your confidence. Give them little tests of trust, like lending them a dollar and seeing if they pay you back. Then move on to bigger tests. Use your judgement to see if they are trustworthy. Despite all this, I believe that there is a person we all can trust. I believe that we can trust in God, because he is always good. God is good, all the time, so He is worthy of our trust. When we trust in Him, he will lead our lives in ways we could never do alone. He is the only one who is fully capable of doing good in our lives. If you don't believe in God, I don't really know what to say. Trust is still important, you just need to find the right people to trust. It is difficult, but finding people you can believe in will change your life.
-Smart

Worth

I recently started thinking about worthiness. Sometimes I look on my life and wonder if I am a worthy person. I'm sure many other people do as well. Worth is always relative to someone or something, so the question is, am I worthy using whose standards? The problem that I think we have is that we feel unworthy using other people's definition of worth. We feel bad because we believe other people think we are worthless. We then take that to mean that we are worthless, which is not true. We think that this worth placed on us by other people is what worth is. The worth placed on us by other people is only their view of how worthy we are. The standard by which we measure worth should not be other people's standards. The next question is, what are we supposed to be worthy of? Are we supposed to be worthy of other people's acceptance? Do we have to have some worth so others will like us? Is that the worth we want to have? Many times we think worth is to be worthy of other people. Other times we may think we have to be worthy for society. We think if we aren't contributing somehow to the benefit of society, we are not worthy. Why not? Do we absolutely have to contribute to society to have some sense of worth? If that is the only way you define your worth maybe. The last thing I can think of at the moment is to be worthy for life. This is what I believe we should think of worth. Are we worthy of life? Is what we do, what we think, what we feel, who we are, worthy of life? Some people say they are not good enough for life. They don't feel as if they deserve to be alive. Again I have to ask by what standard worth is measured. There are many reasons people feel as if they are not worthy of life. I gave some of them earlier. Most of the ways we define our worth are not what worth is. It is only what others make it, and also what you make it. Everyone tries to look at the worth of things, or people. They see a piece of gold, and automatically think of high worth. That's looking at the gold's worth in terms of money, which would be of high worth in those terms. But when we think of gold apart from money, it is actually quite worthless. You may be shocked at this, because we have always defined the worth of gold in terms of money. Imagine if money did not exist, just for sake of argument. What could you do with gold? You could wear it, but there's no practical use for that gold. That gold is practically worthless. Worth changes depending on how it is defined. So how should we look at worth? I believe that if you are alive, you are worthy of life. The fact that you are alive makes you worthy of life, because you are already alive. Think of gold again; in terms of practical use it is worthless, but in terms of money it is highly valuable. We can be like that gold. Either we can be of no worth or we can be of great worth. We just have to look at it differently.    
-Smart

Goals

Today I thought I would write about goals, since the new year is approaching fast. This time of year people start thinking of things they want to do the next year, and usually end up not doing them. This of course begs the question of why we set goals at all. I believe that setting goals is definitely a good thing, if it is done right. People set goals like "lose weight", "work out", "quit smoking", or something of the like. We call these "new year resolutions", which means a determination to do something in the new year. Setting these resolutions is great, but we don't follow them. Why not? I believe we don't go through on our resolutions because we don't set the right goals. We say "lose weight", but we don't say how we are going to lose weight. We set goals without a plan to achieve them. Without that plan, our goals are too vague, so we generally don't follow through on them. When we set goals, they should be as specific as we can make it, so it is easiest to achieve. If you want to work out the new year, set an exercise plan giving specific days of the week in which you will do different exercises. It sounds like a lot of work, but if you do it I guarantee you will find exercising is a lot easier after you plan it out. I once decided I wanted to work out, but I never actually did until I planned out my exercises. If you want to set goals this year, make it specific and detailed. Another problem we have with goals is that we don't set goals we want to achieve. As you may have realized, I talk about what we want a lot. This is because it is so critical to how we live our life. If you really want to do something, you have to put effort into it. The more you want something, the more you will sacrifice for it. When you set goals, the same principle applies. If you really want to finish a goal, you will put more effort into it. The tricky part is finding out what goals you really want to accomplish. One good way to find out what goals you want to achieve is to look at your purpose, and set goals related to it. I cannot tell you what your purpose is, nor can anyone else. You have to find it, and once you do, your life will begin to have a perspective you didn't have before. Once you find your purpose, you will be able to set goals in accordance with it. I am not going to lie, this is much easier said than done. But once you do find out your purpose, your life will be a lot more directed and meaningful. Lastly, don't make your life about accomplishing goals. Goals are a good way to do things in life, but don't make them your entire life. Set goals, but don't freak out if you don't accomplish them. Your life is not about setting goals and reaching them. So what is your life about?
-Smart