Rough draft
Taking history a step farther from the classroom and the usual suspects, we decided to go outside and interview random strangers on wisdom and the different aspects of meaningful and meaningless. Most people let us interview them when we asked. They seemed interested in our project and they stopped and thought deeply about the questions we asked. One such question was what they thought wisdom is. One man said, “It’s the ability to confront the unknown based on knowledge”. This is similar to the majority’s response of experience. 4 out of seven people said wisdom comes with experience and is also about instinct. The other three people said that wisdom along with experience is knowing that you are going to be wrong sometimes. When asked Yu-Xi said, “knowing that to an extent you wont know everything”. When asked if they thought they were wise, half said yes and half said no. One seventh grader could not define what wisdom was but when asked if he was wise he said yes though he couldn’t explain why.
Jace said “ We make our own lives meaningful”. But other people when asked what makes their lives meaningful responded with a quick and strong answer, family and friends. One man said, “ Family is most meaningful because of everything we do together and support each other.” 7 out of11 people gave almost the same response where family was the most meaningful to them. The same guy also said, “ that something is meaningful if it keeps you going from day to day.” 4/11 people agreed that the things that are meaningful in your life are the things that are important and make you happy and you care about. Two of the people also said that love was meaningful.
Family and friends are meaningful and so we then asked them what were the meaningless things in their lives. One lady said “ Catty people” when asked what’s meaningless in life. Catty people are people that like to judge others. Most of the answers were negative aspects on how our culture is represented. One man said, “ Shallow people have meaningless lives” while another man, said, “ Material objects like money are meaningless”. Someone else said human dramas. All these things add up to how must people live their lives cause its human nature to obsess over material objects and to judge other people.
When asked to rank themselves between 1-10 on how meaningful their lives were many people were lower than 8. Though there was a couple that said they were 10’s. One man said “I hope I’m a 10, I haven’t done enough in life, want to get through everything before my life is meaningless”. We interviewed the school nurse and she said “ I would give myself a 10 because I am helping people in my line of work and I feel like I am making a difference”. One woman said, “I would give myself an 8, a 10 if I won the lottery”. The people that gave themselves a 10 seem to think that their lives are just bursting with importance and meaning. There are so many ways to define what’s meaningful and meaningless. It all depends on the person you ask. People’s answers differ but once you look at them as a whole you can see the small similarities. To show us we are not as much different from each other as we think.