Here and Now

Introductory Questions

• Go clean your room, or anything of yours for that matter. Does that make you feel positively about yourself? Now clean something from someone else. Did that evoke the same emotion?

• People often say “less is more,” but is this an excuse for laziness?

• Why do we keep more than we need?

• What does it mean to be famous?

• What is the opposite of fame?

• When was the last time you felt down? Did you tell anyone? Ask a friend the last time they felt down. Did they tell you or anyone?

• Do we need friends?

• What things have made you feel isolated?

• Is language getting simpler?

• Using the fewest words possible, describe a film or book to a friend and see if they get it. What types of films or books require the most words?

• Is there such a thing as “proper speech”?

• What if the world spoke only one language? Would society feel more unified? Or would thousands of cultural identities be eradicated?

Islands of Society I: Giving in Luxury

• Not everyone wants a grandiose lifestyle. Some, mainly millennials, subscribe to the minimalist lifestyle, which seeks to rid oneself of any non-necessities. This lifestyle has been called cultist by some. Learn about the lifestyles below and discuss with your team: is it productive to coin terms for lifestyles if everyone lives a different one? Is it just propaganda or an appeal to tribalism? Or is it helpful for people to know that others are making the same choices as them?

  • Minimalism | Homesteading | Bohemianism

  • Intellectualism | Communal | Occultism

  • Nomadic | Digital Nomad | Empty Nester

  • Bachelor | FIRE | Volunteerism

• To the Amish or Mennonites, a lifestyle without technology is the right way to live. One that does not receive the same level of media attention are the Bruderhof communities, who superficially resemble the Amish or Mennonites but have a few glaring differences. Learn about the histories and lifestyles of all three of these groups, and discuss with your team: can you ever be truly away from modern technology?

• In certain countries, you need not get a job to earn money. Instead, the government provides its citizens a universal basic income, promising them a certain payment for essentially living in their country. Learn about the effects of such a system and discuss with your team: should we have to pay to live if no other organism on this planet does?

• Taking a look at less extreme cases of wanting less, we find many celebrities or relatives of celebrities who have wanted to forsake the publicity that they or someone they are related to have garnered. For example, Princess Diana, among the large-scale humanitarian work that she did, broke royal protocol consistently and greatly disliked her loss of privacy when dating and while married to now King Charles III, later dying from a paparazzi. Discuss with your team: is it wrong for the media to intrude on celebrities’ privacy? Even if, in the case they were to stop, they would go out of business?

• Having a fanbase, fancy cars, and a mansion is appealing to a lot of people. The appeal of a life of luxury seems to have grown with the advent of social media. Some experts, however, see the rise of fame addiction as a problem. Have a look at the following famous people and what they did after they gained or inherited fame, whether that be tragic, noble, or otherwise, and then discuss: what might be the factors that affect how different people react to publicity?

  • José Mujica | Dikembe Mutombo | Warren Buffet | MacKenzie Scott

  • Robin Williams | Kurt Cobain | John McAfee

  • Samantha Markle | Louise Adams | Patricia Lee Lofton

Islands of Society II: Making the Cut-offs

• We often like to categorize ourselves based on uncontrollable, trivialities like birth year, birth month, birth day, or even birth time and draw conclusions from said categorization about personality, future, and more. The irrationalities behind these systems can make them comforting to some, but they draw attention and criticism for being pseudoscientific and cultist. Learn more about the following astrological traditions and practices and discuss with your team: can these systems be correct as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?

  • Babylonian | Hellenistic | Vedic

  • Early Irish | Islamic | Western | Burmese

  • Astrocartography | Cosmobiology | Taiyishenshu

• Categorization is very useful in describing the world, but in the case of humans, we may be leaning too much into an appeal to tribalism. Read this speech by Roger Berkowitz and discuss with your team: is it better to feel like you belong to a group even if it makes you feel you cannot be your true self? Is there a balance between individuality and categorization? Be sure to research the following terms, who or what they refer to, and how they came about.

  • Introvert | Extrovert | Ambivert

  • Jock | Misfit | Floater | Outcast

  • Nerd | Geek | Dork | Square

  • Joe | Karen & Ken | Mary Sue

  • Drama Queen | Short King | Golden Retriever

• Back then, arranged marriages were standard and accepted. Today, they seldom form, although there are some proponents of it today. In a similar vein, many people complain about the complexities of dating and courtship in modern society, and call for a more streamlined way of finding a lifelong partner. However, with the advent of online dating and limited human interaction, it seems to be more difficult than before to form long-term partnerships. Research what the following terms mean and discuss with your team: would it be better if we had a perfect system of dating or courtship? What would such a system entail?

  • Talking | Crush | Infatuation | On-off | Friendzone

  • Orbiting | Love Bombing | Green, Red & Beige Flags

  • Love Triangle | Ghosting | Long-distance | Situationship

• International trade is very useful if a country has a resource and wishes to gain the profits of said resource, or if a country lacks a resource and wishes to gain reliable amounts of said resource. However, international trade can be blocked. China recently placed an embargo on the United States for certain minerals. In WWII, European sanctions against Japan led to the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Learn about the history of sanctions of countries like South Africa and North Korea along with the following types of sanctions and discuss: does it hurt both sides to cut off all trade with one another?

  • Arms embargo | Trade embargo | Financial embargo

  • Dealings Ban | Political embargo | Travel embargo

• Restraining orders are the way for people to prevent contact in-person or online between them and a party they see as harmful or dangerous. Despite these measures being touted as ineffective, China has recently implemented them into their courts. In the case of online human relationships, if a party wants to cut communication with the other, they can resort to blocking. However, blocking correlates with social rejection, which can have effects on the mental and even physical health of the person being rejected. Discuss with your team: should people be more willing to “talk it out” if there are problems between them? Is cutting off communication with another person a form of dehumanization?

• Sometimes it's not the lifestyle you want, but the lifestyle you have. The modern world sees many people, mainly teens and young adults, more depressed than ever. Even certain animals can be affected dramatically by depression. Learn about the difference between depression and a depressive disorder, both of their triggers or causes, and the challenges of solving today’s mental health crisis. Then, discuss with your team: are we too uncompassionate and unempathetic? What about compared to our history? Is the situation today a different kind of “depression”?

• No matter how talkative or energetic you are, it is always healthy to get some me-time. However, coinciding with the mental health crisis is a loneliness epidemic, where people are more isolated than they have ever been. Learn about the effects of social isolation and discuss: if the world is “more connected than ever,” why do we feel so isolated and divided today?

• One way people are coping with loneliness is with virtual companions in the form of chatbots, but some have come more to life, both in VR and otherwise, and there are now numerous cases of these human-nonhuman relationships growing more serious. AI is not even needed for people to grow closer to these “personalities”. Nevertheless, many experts are showing concern and pointing out these relationships’ drawbacks. Learn more about how AI is trained to fulfill this role and discuss with your team: are relationships with non-humans ever the same as ones with humans? Is it healthier to have a lot of non-human relationships than no relationships at all? Could AI foster relationships between other AI?

• Instead of going to meet people in person, many find it easier to talk over calls. If one finds it exceptionally hard to talk to people in real life, they can garner or interact with an audience in the comfort of their own home. Streaming has garnered popularity from more societal isolation. Many people are interested in watching live gaming, showing off beauty products, or even eating. In addition, China’s female streamer industry has seen profound growth, and great controversy and harm during this period. In all of these cases, the connections that people make are not the same as typical friendships. Learn about what it means to be in a parasocial relationship and the following terms describing relationships today, then discuss with your team: is it healthy for someone to love someone who doesn’t know them? Has streaming had an overall positive or negative effect on society? Where is the line between a healthy and unhealthy parasocial relationship? Can you survive with no friendships but a lot of parasocial relationships?

  • One-way | Two-way | One-and-a-half-way

Language Erosion

• If you’ve ever had a friend who was able to talk a lot without really saying anything, they may greatly benefit from learning how to be concise. They could take inspiration from Spartans, or gain emotional intelligence. Although marginal, they may benefit from using more contractions. Some modern contractions are becoming more and more accepted in formal writing, although not nearly as much as in Early Modern English. Learn about the rules and reasons behind contractions today and some examples of contraction in the following languages and then discuss with your team: can any word be contracted? Why should some words elide to less and not others?

  • French | Dutch | Italian

  • Classical Chinese | Japanese | Tagalog

• In the field of linguistics, laws tell us what to expect when observing and documenting a language. However, they are not observed in every case. Research the following linguistic laws and discuss: why do we call these laws if they are only trends?

  • Zipf’s Law | Brevity Law | Menzerath’s Law | Martin’s Law

• There are two types of people: prescriptivists and descriptivists. Much drama has stirred up between these two schools of thinking, and ultimately, both appear to have some value. Research the difference between the two and discuss with your team: given the diversity of human language, how can one way of speaking be fundamentally better or worse than another? Be sure to learn about the term prestige dialect.

• Similar to atoms of the universe, morphemes are the indivisible building blocks of words. Learn about the difference between a bound morpheme and a free morpheme and discuss with your team: would language be simpler if all words were made with their own morpheme? Would it be simpler if there were only 100 morphemes that the language could use to combine to form words?

• Linguist R. M. W. Dixon posits a clock metaphor for how languages evolve over time. He places the categories of fusional at 12:00, analytic at 4:00, and agglutinative at 8:00. Learn about what these and the following terms mean, and this cycle’s validity. Be sure to learn about which languages can be put into which category, and how some cross between them. Then, discuss: is it useful to categorize human language given how diverse and fluid it is?

  • Analytic | Synthetic | Polysynthetic | Oligosynthetic

  • Agglutinative | Fusional | Isolating

• Just like how you might describe someone as being courteous, thoughtful and charitable, linguists describe languages with numerous terms for phenomena they come across. Research the following phenomena that languages undergo or exhibit and discuss with your team: is it useful to coin terms for aspects of language, or are we trivializing the languages in question?

  • Jespersen’s cycle | Pro-drop | Omnipredicativity

• You might change your appearance or your interests over time. Frequently, languages see change in the form of sound changes. Usually, these are motivated by a want for the language to be easier to pronounce. Research the following sound changes and discuss: are speakers just lazy? Impatient? If you were to forsake or change something in a math equation, it would not yield the same result, so how scientific really is the study of human language?

  • Syncope | Apocope | Aphaeresis | Haplology

  • Assimilation | Dissimilation | Merger

  • Grimm’s Law | Weise’s Law | Canaanite Shift

• Reconstructing past languages only gives us an educated guess as to what the language of a historic society was like. To truly document or learn about a language that has ceased to be spoken, an archaeological miracle is required. Learn about the following historical artifacts or documents and discuss with your team: should we spend more time learning about the ways past societies spoke? What use is it to do this?

  • Rosetta Stone | Code of Hammurabi | Frieze from Ateban Mausoleum

  • Codex Argenteus | Cippus Perusinus | Çineköy inscription | Uyuk-Tarlak II

• To those who think the world would be better off speaking only one language, turn to none other than lingua francae. However, it seems unfair to have the native speaking population of a lingua franca be superficially privileged in not having to learn another language to communicate. Thus, many people throughout history have designed international auxiliary languages with the goal of allowing people to communicate with each other while maintaining a level of fairness, as everyone would have to learn the language. Research the following cases, why they were made, and how much success they saw. Then, discuss with your team: is it productive to try and unite people under a common language if that language embodies the identities of none of them?

  • Volapük | Volapük Nulik | Nal Bino

  • Loglan | Lojban | Toaq

  • Esperanto | Ido | Interlingua

  • International Sign | Blissymbols

• Another constructed language Toki Pona has seen substantial popularity and attention, but its design goals were very different to conlangs before it. Learn about the reasons people make their own languages, and discuss with your team: is it more productive to be learning already existing languages to communicate than it is to make up a completely new one that no one but you can speak?

  • Auxlang | Artlang | Naturalistic artlang

  • Secretlang | Engelang | Loglang

• Parallelling language evolution and growth is language death. As much as speech appears ingrained in the minds of many, most languages today are tragically trending towards extinction or have already kicked their word for “bucket.” Research the following instances of language extinction and how they manifested and discuss with your team: is the death of a language the same as the death of a culture? If an ethnic group loses its language but persists, is it worth trying to revitalize or revive the language that their identity is tied to? Be sure to learn about the term liturgical language.

  • Vulgar Latin | Sanskrit | Biblical Hebrew

  • Ubykh | Beothuk | Macorix | Damin

  • Ainu | Guanche | Khitan | Tambora

Concluding Questions

• It is never a good feeling when you are singled out. However, standing up for another person in that situation is rare, and children seem to not perpetuate the problem, but withdraw themselves from the problem. If someone cannot help themselves, how responsible are we to pick them up and oppose the perpetrator?

• In a world where people bicker and fight over what is rightfully theirs, we can look to cultures around the world that are much less materialistic. Does claiming ownership simplify a land or object’s history? Should a place or thing that is used more by someone go to that person?

• In a time where stressors around the world are at a high, it pays to be able to reliably clear your mind. Meditation is a common way for people to allow the thoughts that plague themselves to disperse, and for them to refocus on what is important—the present. Learn about the history of meditation. If AI reaches a level of sentience comparable to humans, would it require such practices? What if the human mind evolved to cope with more and more stresses?