Hello there blog goers. Welcome to week 4 of my weekly review posts. This past week was a busy one, with a lot of editing, and listening to the sound of my own voice. It wasn’t the most fun to be honest, but with a whole year of podcasting to be had, I’m probably going to have to get used to it.

This week we started a new set of exercise type things. Ms. Maxwell said that we’re going to start a thing called analyzing theme. We were looking at the theme of our podcast episode, short film, and a short story. When we started the analysis of the short story (by Edgar Allen Poe) I noticed a strange phrase in the introductory paragraph. The phrase I saw was “The Human Condition”. When I saw this I was really curious what this meant I’d heard my say it before, but I didn’t actually know it’s meaning. So I decided to go a little deeper. 

Exact Definition From Wikipedia 

“The human condition is all of the characteristics and key events that compose the essentials of human existence, including birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, conflict, and mortality”

That was the Wikipedia definition of the human condition, but from all the sources i looked at, I think the most simple explanation is, The Human condition is the experiences that makes us human. It’s interesting because it does sound quite a lot like the concept of identity, but it’s actually quite different. The human condition is made up by a couple key things every human will do, life, growth, aging, death, and some kind of emotions. From what I could gather, part of being human is the fact that we have consciousness in our emotions, mortality, and other things, allows us to truly ask questions, like… Why am I here, or, What’s the meaning of life, or, What does it mean to be human. Big questions that often alter our emotional states and are a point of conflict for humans, which is perhaps a reason why a lot of humans never ask these questions, however that is not the point of this post. 

When I did a bit thinking about this, I did not think I would end up with this existential of a post. As adults like to say, I’m probably a bit young to be thinking/worried about that, but i find it so interesting, it’s hard to not think about it. Many a philosopher has spent their life just thinking about this topic, and yet even the greatest minds still can’t quite fully comprehend the human condition. Much like the brain, the intricacies of the human condition are complicated and hard to put into words. That’s why as we continue looking at texts I hope we look at some more texts that explore the meaning of the human condition, do that I can get a better grasp on the concept, and maybe one day have the answers to some of those incredibly hefty questions, Im sorry for this crazy brain dump of a blog post, but I hope you enjoyed it. Today I’ll leave you with an interesting quote on the human condition which recognizes the idea of consciousness in decision making, and from an author hopefully all of PLP recognizes.

Holly ~

“Our behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”

― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change