Combination of Good and Evil (logos)

            People can’t completely be all good or bad, one day we may do a good deed that came from a pure and kind part of us and then a day later we could do a terrible act that came from a darker side.  We are a combination, a mixture; we are complex and with complexity, many different aspects come into play all at one time.

            We’ve all wanted to be that person who lives a normal life by day and a red caped, masked, super powered hero by night.  However, in the drawing the author conveys that physical strength and being a damsel in distress aren’t things that we should strive to be.  There’s more to being a superhero than what we think.  We should strive to do acts of good and to stop the bad acts that happen in front of us that is what a real superhero would do.  There also isn’t such a thing as a superhero that doesn’t commit bad or wrong acts themselves, because it’s impossible to be completely good or evil.  Being able to see the good in the bad and seeing the bad in the good is how we should live life.  Take for instance how many movies, TV shows, and comic books portray the typical superhero and how many kids grow up strive to be exactly like them, the flying and super strength in all.  What we don’t instill into the younger generation is that there is constantly good and evil everywhere we look and that it’s up to each individual to do more acts of goodness then of wrongdoing.

            Fritz Haber is the perfect example of how we all are composed of good and evil. Constantly searching whether we are considered good or bad is something we all do and do until we die, you might say it’s an reflex obsession to figure out what kind of person we all are. Hearing the story how this man designed something as good as trying to create a chemical to produce more food for the hungry, but turn it into a mass killing agent makes you wonder is he a good man or a bad man.  From a Nobel Prize winner to captain of chemical warfare. The only way it can make sense is if we are both.  We may be born good and happen to bad acts, but if we continue to do these bad acts than you become a bad person who occasionally do good acts. Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, we are split, we have good and bad to us this combination allows us to react differently in each situation and ultimately makes us unique and gives us our personality.  Even as far back as biblical times, Lucifer was one of God’s favorite angles, but he disobeyed God and now is the fallen angel of evil.  There are no absolutes, only partially good and partially bad.        

The Grant Study/ Love Hurts

            Love Hurts (Other People), written by Stephanie Pappas, reminds me of the Grant study. The Grant study, published in the Atlantic and written by Joshua Wolf Shenk, explains the scientific research study done by Harvard researchers that followed 268 men and chronicled their levels of happiness throughout the years. What the study found is that love truly effects how we develop as adults. One case explains how one of the test subjects was forced to eat alone for six years; this Grant study man later developed psychiatric problems.  Love Hurts, like the Grant study, is based on a trio of studies which took 130 people who are in serious relationships and eventually showed that when they are in a long term relationship their brains will do what it needs to “protect” the relationship, even if that means putting down potential threats. This directly relates to the Grant Study man’s brain becoming psychotic to make up for the lack of love from his family as he was forced to eat alone. The first study of the trio, at Florida university the test subjects were asked to fill out questions to see their level of jealousy, much like the Grant study where the Grant men were asked to fill out questionnaires and send them back based on their level of happiness. One of the big focuses in Love Hurts is jealousy; throughout the studies the researchers found people with higher jealousy would respond more harshly to pictures of potential threats to their relationships, so the researchers decided to see if low jealousy people were different than the jealous types. They designed a test in which the couples would separately be shown profiles of people of their same sex in their area who were signing up for a dating site, these profiles were made to be a threatening as possible to the peoples relationships and what the results proved was that even low jealously people still rated their potential threats as unattractive.  Both The Grant Study and Love Hurts had very different results than were expected when the studies began. Like the Grant Study, Love hurts is similar because both are scientific experiments that showed that our brains will automatically adapt to the situations we are in, in order to cope with the possible threat or situation we are in.

Our Love Vs Reality

Love is the feeling of being desired by others. Between the two sources, Stephanie Pappas' article "Love Hurts" and Yann Dall'Aglio's video "Love--you're doing it wrong", love seems to become a sense of materialistic desire. We are used to the idea that love is the unexplainable reason why we will sacrifice ourselves for another person. However, in the article and video we are forced to view ourselves as people who can easily be swayed by our innate sense of insecurity stemming from jealousy of not being desired by our partners. In the video we are all "useless", because in order to feel value we need to gain the feeling of compassion from others. Highlighted in the article, even when people feel as if they are in a successful, romantic relationship, they still have the potential of feeling threatened by others who seem attractive. With a comparing outcome from the Yann Dall'Aglio's discussion, our level of seduction capital, or desirability, is directly measured by others' view of us. Unfortunately, it seems as if our fairytale visions of mankind mask the true drive behind our instinctive craving to feel useful, which can only be achieved by other's view of us.

When watching “Love your doing it wrong” one of the main things he was supposed to be talking about was love.  But he started off his speech with defining love as the desire to be desired, which opened up the question that got me thinking of how does one become desirable and then stay desirable?  It is true that in today’s world you are free to value anything however you want too, and likewise everybody can value you however they want too.  This seems like a major problem because every single person wants the freedom to decide what they like, what they love, and what they don’t like and hate, but nobody wants to allow another person to tell them they aren’t good enough and aren’t worthy of their love; or for that matter anyone’s love.    Yann Dall'Aglio answers this problem by letting us know that people try to collect traits that will make them desirable and loved and then ultimately happy, whether they do this on purpose or not.  The grant study used a lot of information to show if the people in relationships were really happy and why?  I think that was a big difference between it and what Yann was speaking on, because he was focusing a lot on Love, but more on what it truly meant to be loved and to love others unconditionally.  The Grant study did connect with “Love Your doing it wrong” when it did find that some people were not happy and got divorced, and to me this was the same as Yaan confirming people have the freedom to value or disvalue anyone or anything as they please.  Yaan really seemed to be speaking on the uncertainty of whether or not the love for something or somebody will always stay.  This all hit home to me because even though I really don’t like that people have the right to pick what they like and why they like it I still respect that you can do that, because I personally love being able to decide that I love someone or something on day and then in two weeks just decide I don’t like it all.

When comparing the Grant Study paper to Yann Dall'Aglio's speech, I used Yann's idea of wanting to be desired and remain desirable as a measure of happiness. I noticed in a few examples that were given in the study that though people may have been financially successful and lived valued lives in the perspective of monetary values they still were unhappy. Those who maybe weren't so financially stable with closer family ties seemed to be happier, or at least not depressed to the point of suicide. When I read Yann's speech I thought about how I like the feeling of being "desired" or having a strong relation with someone. That feeling makes me happier than any sum of money could ever make me. There are friends in my life that have spent the vast majority of their lives chasing a financial goal as apposed to a relationship goal or even sharing their time with another. These friends have aged passed how old they actually are. In my eyes what makes us happy is a sense of belonging or a sense of being "desired" in Yann's words. Finances are a necessity but like people always say money can't buy happiness.

Love: You're Doing it Wrong/What Makes Us Happy

  I believe "Love: You're Doing It Wrong" and "What Makes Us Happy?" share similar ideas because they both show how the people around us have a major affect on the way we feel. In "Love: You're Doing It Wrong", Yann Dall'Aglio explains how many of us need to be valued, admired, or appreciated by other people in order for us to feel loved. We try to acquire the best cars, the best jobs, the best qualities, etc. not because we desire them, but because other people desire and value these things. When other people value us and what we have, we feel loved. Instead of loving ourselves, many of us need to gain love and admiration from other people so we can feel loved.
  In "What Makes Us Happy?", some of the results from Dr. Vaillant's study proved that our relationships with other people affect our level of happiness. If we don't form good relationships, then we will probably have a much more difficult time trying to find happiness. In the article, Joshua Wolf Shenk states "Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger." 
  Dall'Aglio's speech and Shenk's article both express the same idea: other people affect the way we feel. They just express this idea in slightly different ways; and they focus on different emotions. Shenk uses more of an experimental and statistical approach to show how other people affect our happiness. Dall'Aglio uses his humor and real-world examples to keep the audience engaged, and to help them better understand how other people affect the feeling of being loved.  

Love Hurts

In my opinion the topic in “Love Hurts” is different than the topic from the Grant study. The topic in “Love Hurts” is about love, and the Grant study was about happiness. Although there was some mentioning about the subjects love life, the Grant study was primarily focused on happiness. Both of these studies are very interesting and really show a different perspective on things.

“Love Hurts” was an article about how the partners reacted when taking studies that showcased “potential threats” to their other partner. When the partners looked at these “threats” they were asked to give their opinions, and they did not hold back. “… rating them as unattractive, unfriendly and other insulting adjectives.” This made me realize why the title of this article was “Love Hurts.” It hurts because these people are lashing out on people of the same sex that they feel are competition to them. This does show that these people really do love their partner. They feel that they’re the only ones their partner should be with. They get a little jealous and talk negatively about these potential “threats.”  I believe that this study did show to the partners that love sometimes does hurt.

The Grant study was about a few hundred students and how happy they were throughout their lives. This study literally knew everything about their subjects. They studied how experiences and people changed the lives of their subjects. Some were changed for the better, and some were changed for the worse. Something in this study that was similar to the article was love. The Grant study also looked at the relationships of the subjects. Some stayed with their first love and some divorced. Some of the subjects’ parents divorced as well. These events definitely affected their happiness.

These studies as we can see are different from each other, but have a similarity. The Grant Study was a more broad study about the lives of these people and how happy they were. The article “Love Hurts” was about a specific study that showed a different side of people in long term relationships.