The Importance Of The Self

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A person’s life is comprised of random events with a central lifestyle that affect the individual. But what makes her self a result of these events? In Karen Armstrong’s “Homo religiosus,” she states how religion affected a person lifestyle in the past. With these lifestyles being the central purpose in their lives, people looked to religion to find a meaning in their lives and developed their self because of it. In Sherry Turkle’s “Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,” religion is seemingly replaced by machines that interact with humans due to the fact that they both involve a sacrifice and help find a person’s self. In Barbara Frederickson’s “Selections from Love 2.0, How Our Supreme …show more content…

Spanning from connections, such as friendships, to the loss of connections, such as death, all factor in to the creation of one’s self. In Turkle’s case, children mourn the loss of their Tamagatchi and Furbies when something wrong happens to them. “With the Tamagatchi [and Furby], we see the beginning of mourning for artificial life” (Turkle 467). Earlier in the excerpt, Turkle mentions how Sigmund Freud talks about the meaning of loss and states that it “teaches us that the experience of loss is part of how we build a self” (Turkle 466). Although it is just a machine, the children are saddened from the fact that they have lost something that they have spent their time caring for. However, the children grow from these experiences because they learn the lesson of loss which might have the tiniest bit of effect of helping them in future situations by being able to cope better for future losses. Although negative impacts will build a self, positive impacts will also improve the self. Frederickson’s excerpt is mostly focused on the effects on positive emotions on the self and how the self reacts to these emotions. She states how positive emotions result in a resonance that is positive and that it expands to include others. Frederickson explains that “when [we] experience positivity resonance together with this sense of expansion, it’s also deeply physical, …show more content…

This is an endless loop in that the lifestyle creates the selfless self, and as a result, the selflessness affects a person’s view on the lifestyle which tells the person to continue it. In Turkle’s case, the children have to sacrifice a bit of their own time to spend it with their Tamagatchis and Furbies. With the encouraging attitude the Tamagatchis and Furbies give to the children, the children are more than happy to spend their time with

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