One of my favorite pastimes is to watch videos on TED.com. The TED videos are a series of recorded lectures from the Annual Technology Engineering & Design conference. The people featured in these videos are some of the most amazing, thought-provoking, and inspiring folks you could ever hope to meet.
I could watch TED videos all day long. In fact, sometimes I do, and that's the problem. By watching amazing people do amazing things, my empathetic emotional response gives me all those same feelings of awesomeness without any of the outlay. I get all the benefit of their labor with none of the effort.
It's been said that actors are valuable to the world because they do what the rest of the world can't or won't allow themselves to do. Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia unifies the Arabs to fight the Turks, Michael C Hall as Dexter murders serial killers, and Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview sacrifices everything in his life for the sake of success. Through these performances, the audience is able to experience what the extremes of life would be like, without leaving the safety of the choices they have made.
Which makes me wonder - Do inspiring performances create a better world? Or do they simply allow us to feel like we've accomplished something even when we haven't?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments for this post. For now, I'll leave you with some of my favorite TED talks:
The Jansen creates walking sculptures:
Al Gore on Climate Change:
Jill Bolte Taylor shares the experience of her stroke:
1 comment:
In answer to your questions:
Both.
And there's nothing wrong with either.
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