Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Okay you know those smiley face emoticons you use in emails to express how your feeling? Well picture a classic smiley face for me. Now mentally position that smiley face in the room with you. The smiley face is sitting next to you on your bed or across from you at the McDonalds your eating at. Now take that smiley face and clone him a couple times. Until there's at least ten smiley faces in the room with you. Now picture a sad face emoticon. Add the one sad face to the room with you and all the happy faces. And seeing the one sad face sitting there in the middle of a bunch of happy faces how do you feel? You feel sad right? Sad for the poor loner sad face. I'm sure most people would feel that way. Now how about reversing the picture. Instead of having 10 happy faces and 1 sad one we now have 10 sad faces and 1 happy one. Seriously think about that for a second. What is your first reaction to this picture? Is it happiness? But why should you be happy about that? You've got 10 sad faces and only one happy. Isn't that depressing? But that's not the way the human mind works. We sympathize with the individual and the individual alone; oblivious to the whole. So seeing one happy face in the crowd we feel happy for the individual even though the crowd at large is sad. Or did you feel sad for all the sad smileys? I felt sad for them. But not at first. At first I only noticed the happy individual. And be honest with yourself you probably felt happy before you felt sad. Or maybe it's not the same when all you have is a mental picture. I've placed the wallpaper that started this whole rant at the bottom of the page for you to look at if you feel you need a real visual. So you can go ahead and look at that now. If you want to. I feel I've said enough for one post so I'm login' off. ~Shane

2 comments:

  1. Your absolutly right. I saw the pic at the bottom of the page before reading your post (I was looking at your list of books which is really impressive by the way) and I did feel happy at first. In fact I only started feeling sad about the other smileys after reading your post. Jeez and now I feel horrible about it. =/
    I guess people do think about the individual.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah sometimes I feel like humanity is failing. And that we are all going to kill each other off. And the world would be better off without us here to pollute everything with all our toxins.
    Obviously the animals and plants know how to take care of the earth. It's just us that are screwing it up. We may have been born with a higher intelagince than animals but we weren't born with the natural instinc they have. Reason is usless in some cases

    ReplyDelete