What is the truth of happiness? The truth of Happiness is a vague topic we have yet to fully understand, and that is why for over a course of our learning we spent researching to seek a deeper meaning of the truth. From Brave New World by Huxley, we derived our big question, "What is the truth of happiness?" furthermore delving into the subject with activities, videos, and articles. Additionally, we generated a google document filled with annotations as our bibliography to site our sources, later creating a question we'd use to develop our information and research as we slowly transitioned to a new level of understanding of happiness and meaning. To fully show how comprehensive we undertood our interpretation of the readings and videos of happiness we spent our class time on, our final assignment to finish off our project was to produce a documentary (YouTube video) with group members that shared similar views to what we wanted to direct our film towards.
"A happy Meaning."
ANnotated bibliography
Happiness Experiment
Happiness Project Reflection
"What have you discovered your truth of happiness is?"
Throughout this project, I discovered a variety of perspectives of what happiness may truly stand as, from the analytical and scientific viewpoint, to the more psychological and emotionally interpretation. To have a meaningful in life as stated from the article, 'There's more to life than being happy,' by Emily Esfahani Smith, she refers to a Jewish psychiatrist by the name Viktor Frankl, using his well renounced book, 'Man's search for meaning,' to support her claims. "In both cases, it was a question of getting them to realize life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them," Frankl stated as he wrote, "...But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'" Personally, I would've never thought of happiness and meaning the way I do now if I hadn't come across this article. I truly feel and am able to understand with what Viktor Frankl had wrote, which had given me my own perspective and ability to grasp this content. In my own words, the truth of happiness is not complete if there is no true meaning in an individual's life to pursue, as it helps guide and identify who you are, and what you want to do with your life.
"What was the greatest challenge you faced in this project & how did you work through it?"
Aside from researching, the most challenging difficulty of the entirety of this project wasn't the academics, but rather being in a group. To be honest, I actually felt fine working with the people in my group, but since I had no idea how efficient two of our members interacted and participated to working, I didn't entirely trust them at the start. This held back my efforts to contribute to our video as I was partnered with an individual I had hardly ever spoke to, my perspective and assumptions partially at fault for my lack of communication and trust to address this maturely. I did however overcome this near the end of our deadline closing as I realized we were all graded based on how well our video was produced, and put aside whatever I had felt, and applied full effort into our script, footage, and voice overs.
"How have you grown as a group worker in this project? If you did this individually, why did you chose to and how did this choice impact your project?"
I feel that as a group worker, I've grown immensely with my effort and motivation to participate more with my partners and assignments. I took initiation to be in parts of the video, putting my skills to test as I presented information to be apart of our video, and wrote parts of our videos script to increase our process, also taking part in voicing over the written script I had wrote. I believe that overall, I was able to push out of my comfort zone and put myself out there. I do feel that this experience has prepared in me in way to adapt more and to contribute as a member of the group fairly.
"If you could refine any part of this project, thinking back through the entire project, Brave New World through experiments to videos, what would you refine, and how would you refine it?
Thinking back at the entire project, I feel the only part I'd really want refine would be our video. I believe that our video had great potential if we were given more time to work, but due to one group member doing hardly any work to contribute, we were often held back, which I feel is one of the reasons we lacked in some areas. Our scenes could've looked more professional as well, and the stock footage could have been more high quality too. In our video we also included interviews, and if I could change anything, I'd reselect the individuals, choosing people who truly took the interviews seriously with deep thought. I mean no disrespect to my partners as our video turned out pretty good under a short amount of time which I was impressed with, and like as I said, I wasn't trusting to work with a few people of my group so this surprised me. I think that if I was to redo this project, I'd choose the option to work individually to produce my own video the way I would've liked how to turn out.