Xuen Tey - Week #14 - Perspective
How does one’s memories in a situation affect their viewpoint in specific events? Perspective is a key part of every event, and depending on the position one is in during situations, their opinion on said situation is different. Any situation can be viewed extremely differently by two people depending on their own circumstances.
An event where a person wins may be happy to them since they had their own achievement, but it may be a sad memory to another person who lost to them, or the event may be viewed as negative to a different person in the same situation if the person felt like they didn’t deserve the win. Depending on the circumstances of various people, the same event is twisted into a million different versions according to the person.
Memories make up most of one’s viewpoint, as the way one was raised, the experiences they’ve had, their education, and several other factors massively impact a person’s viewpoint. Memories fundamentally make up a part of a person, and people’s perspectives differ according to their own experiences and memories since everyone has their own memories of events. Memories are entirely subjective according to the person who made it and their character.
The nature versus nurture debate is heavily tied into this as well, since nurture is entirely based off of the memories one develops as they grow and are ‘nutured’ by their environment while their ‘nature’ is an inherent quality of theirs unchanged by their environment that is built into their consciousness. The question in its basest form is asking about whether the inherent programming built into a person is more impactful, or the memories and experiences they developed due to their environment is more important. The debate asks about the importance of memories in a person’s life and how much these experiences truly contribute to a person’s character.
Hi Xuen, your blog this week was a very interesting read as it brought up multiple interesting points. First and foremost, I really appreciated and agree with the arguments you made regarding how memories and perspectives are circumstantial. People forget that there are always two sides to a coin and one person's success may be another’s misfortune. Also, everyone is different, very rarely do people always see eye to eye on things and more often do people interpret the same thing in numerous ways, it is what makes humanity unique and special. If anything, like you said, memories are at the very core of our beliefs because our very thought process is built up by past experiences and I loved how you drew on the idea of nature vs. nurture to drive this point home. If anything, nature and nurture work hand in hand to help us establish ourselves in society because we develop our memories in an environment that heavily influences the type of memories that we cultivate. When you refer to the debates about the importance of memories in a person’s life and the overall impact that it has on a person’s character, I believe that memories are unequivocally the most important aspect of someone’s personality. If anything, even our personalities are based on our memories, as we try to mimic things we have done in the past that have helped us succeed and carry ourselves in such a way that invites success vice versa with the more embarrassing memories. I will never understand why people so often underestimate the power and importance of memories because memories are the very foundation of how we construct ourselves.
ReplyDeleteHello, Xuen! To be honest, I normally first look at images when I read blogs, and I somehow managed to completely miss how your image related (I know it was super obvious, but my eyes kind of glazed over when looking at it). It’s interesting how you focused on perspectives in this blog. Humans are innately self-centered, so I think there’s a lot to gain from observing our experiences from the eyes of others.
ReplyDeleteSince you didn’t provide an opinion on nature vs nurture, I will provide mine! I feel that for the nature vs nurture debate, both nature and nurture are incredibly important in shaping a person. That being said, I believe that nurture has a far, far greater impact on someone. Memories are incredibly important, and I feel that anyone that believes in inherent characteristics in a person fails to acknowledge the large majority. Sure, there may be innate psychopaths, but those are fringe examples that cannot represent the majority. People place so much importance on their lives and their experiences, so it should only be natural that those make up most of their personalities.