Por: Ana Benet Rivera Pintor
On September 11th, the groups of advanced and academic English had a workshop led by Jaime García y Espinosa, professor of the Ibero University in Puebla. He started off his talk with a video by the name of “Man”, which depicted humanity’s actions and effects against our environment. Then we had a conversation between everyone in the classroom about what we gathered from the video shown. After that, the professor asked us what it meant to be a “good” adult and what kind of adult we wanted to be when we grew up.
I thought that the video was very impactful because it did not try to sugar coat any of humanity’s acts, on the contrary the video showed an average man committing despicable actions in a rather unapologetically manner just because the results were convenient or “fun” for him. Even though the human could clearly see all the negative effects that he was causing to the environment he turned a blind eye and continued on the path that he was taking. Which I think is very common in our society, even when we hear and see the warnings of global warning we mainly just complain about the problem without actually taking any action to solving the problem. During the conversation a lot of people said that it was because we had to continue living our lives, we have school, jobs, and families to take care of so we ignore the big problems because we believe that these don’t have a current direct impact on our lives.
Then we talked about what it means to be a good adult and what kind of characteristics a good adult would have. The consensus was that a good adult was someone that cared for others, someone who spend their lives trying to make a difference in the world, and who is ultimately happy with their role and contribution to our society, and I completely agree with these ideas. Unfortunately I don’t believe that everything is so clean cut like most adults tend to tell us. Since we were little we have been led to believe that we can be anything we choose to be and that it is important to follow our dreams and passions no matter what, because when you love your job you don’t work a day in your live. But somewhere along the way that message began to change little by little, maybe not intentionally but it has changed. We know that we have to worry about being able to make a good living with our job in order to support ourselves and in a future a family. We have learned that it is better to have stability in this ever changing economy, that we can’t worry about other people if we are not able to care for ourselves first.
While I believe that it is more important to be happy with what you do instead of worrying how much money it pays, it is hard to apply these ideals in the harsh world we live in. We were led to believe that making the choice between a normal job and our dream job would be easy, when it is anything but easy. This talk opened my eyes to this reality, and I really liked the emphasis that the professor made on being happy with the work that we do. Whenever anyone said that their aim in life was to make money he questioned them as to why and if they were sure if that was really more important to them than being content. His constant questioning made me realize that even though it might be easier to go the safe route career wise, nothing worthwhile ever came easy so choosing the safe choice might not bring the sense of accomplishment that we all wish for.
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