We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

Caleb Martinez Self Deception Self deception is the process of misleading ourselves to accept and believe claims about ourselves as true or valid when they are actually false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is how we justify false beliefs about ourselves. Although the thought of actively deceiving ourselves is not something one would be openly content with happening, self deception is something that can happen knowingly and intentionally and although it may be something that is beneficial

A Walk with Job The Old Testament is filled with fascinating stories about freedom, war, sacrifice, love, etc. The list could go on for quite a while, but I personally have trouble connecting with the majority of these stories. Because I have trouble connecting with the stories, the characters are hard to relate with. They seem to be heroes, warriors, and simply just hard to fathom. Luckily, there is one character in the Old Testament that I can connect with and exemplifies everything that God

five brothers, two sisters, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. This is the true story of The Holocaust was the systematic murder of over 6,000,000 Jews. Adolf Hitler, Germany’s leader at the time, was the reason why all these innocent people were murdered, he and ultimately committed suicide on April 30th, 1945. However, his evil spirit still lies, with all those people that still live to tell the tale of the atrocities they experienced, beyond words, in his concentration camps. The way

Usually our voice for telling a story is our own writing self.  A person that understands the situation at hand and speaks in a manner relevant to the situation.  We don't normally create a separate narrator to make our writing more interesting.  We simply write our thoughts and opinions to convey our ideas.  But Jeffery Eugenides writing the Virgin Suicides brought out a separate part of himself to narrate for him.  An entirely fabricated group to speak the story of the girls.  This helped both

Day” truly shows how prevalent bullying is in our day. In his poem he tells the story of how he got his offensive nickname –Pork Chop. Additionally, he tells us that many kids are bullied today, just as he was. He says: “I’m not the only kid who grew up this way, surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones. As if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we’d be

The Bhagavad Gita and A Thousand and One Nights serve as a lesson for how to live and act in the world. A Thousand and One Nights employs parables to expound on the decadence of human nature and the Bhagavad Gita discusses how to live a spiritual life without complete withdrawal from society. In A Thousand and One Nights, the dualism between vengeance and mercy as told through Shahrazad’s stories teaches us about the complexity of life and need for empathy in an unjust world. By choosing to be vengeful

How Easily do we Deceive ourselves Humans have the tendency to believe what they want, and do as they please for their benefit. By embracing a range of falsehoods it’s easier for a person to live an invisible life rather than to live in reality, were suffering does not exist and everything can be overcome. Using literary work such as, Native Son, and Battle Royal, we can illustrate how deceiving ourselves can impact what actually happens in our life. In Richard Wright’s novel the Native Son, He

Imagination and the Holocaust The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry" I believe that truly humane learning

implies that people generally view the world from a selfish perspective and elaborates on how the world should work to reverse its self-centered ways. Wallace reveals his topic through a series of anecdotes, each highlighting a different way we are focused on ourselves and then providing a way to view each situation from a different perspective. Wallace’s purpose is to point out the faults in thinking only for

exploration and self-discovery as we follow the main character, Santiago, a young shepherd who lives in Spain, on a journey to fulfill his personal legend. The novel shows us wisdoms and gentle reminders of how to change our lives from what they may be today into the life we have always dreamed of. The novel tells us that the fear of failure is the greatest obstacle to happiness. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” So often we hide behind excuses of not