Looking from a different angle

From February until June the A Broader Mind Course is given at VU. As this is the fourth year of my Bachelor study and I only had to follow one course in period 4 and 5, I thought it would be a nice addition to my studies to follow the course. There were two tracks that could be followed and I decided to follow the track concerning the following themes:

·   Viewpoints and Worldview;

·   Health and Happiness;

·   Digital world;

·   Sustainability.

These are topics we don’t really cover in our study, so I thought they would be interesting to really gain a broader mind. By watching videos, making assignments and having discussions about different themes I gained a lot of new insights, which I am happy to share with you.

So I’ll just start with discussing the first theme “Viewpoints and Worldview”. The way you look at certain topics can differ very much with the way someone else looks at them. How your opinion is formed is by different positionalities: religion and lifestyle, ethnicity, health, generation, social status, gender and sexual orientation. I find it quite interesting that all people think differently and that our environment influences us. I noticed that people usually tend to hang around others with whom they can identify. I can totally understand that these people are the ones we feel most comfortable with, but this way people stay inside a “bubble” which makes it more difficult to emphasize with the population from outside the bubble. I became more aware of the importance of opening up to others. During the course it was quite nice that there were a lot of people from different (study) backgrounds which made the discussion even more interesting. Asking people why they think about something their way, can give new insights as well as more understanding for people in different situations. I dare you to have a conversation with someone you normally wouldn’t talk to and see if you learn something new.

The next theme was “Health and Happiness”. Like I already mentioned in the previous theme, your health can affect your viewpoints. If you ask one of the questions “What is health?” or “What is happiness?”, you would probably get different answers depending on who you would be asking. We read stories about people with different sorts of disabilities, and find out that people can be very judgmental on who they think is happy and/or healthy and who can’t be. If we see someone with a physical disability, we tend to think they are unhappy because they are different, but this is not an assumption we can just make. Because people with a good mindset can really be happy even though they have a disability and maybe have to go through much tougher circumstances than others. On the other hand there are also people who look healthy, but experience the effects of mental illnesses which influence their happiness. Whether we are aware of it or not, we all make assumptions about people based on the first impression. It’s normal, but important to not let them influence the way you act towards people. Another part of the theme I really liked was that we talked about the things we are grateful for. Being grateful for the good things we have, the nice people that are around us, the fun things we can do and even the tasty things we can eat, makes life a bit better and happier. I am really trying to adapt this to my lifestyle. Especially during this pandemic it is a good way to stay positive and think in terms of possibilities instead of limitations.  

For the “Digital World” theme we looked at the impact of the digital world around us with its upsides and downsides. We thought about questions like: “If you would be a tyrant that wants to suppress its citizens, how could you use this technology?” – which of course is on the extreme side. But we were also challenged to do a digital detox for 24 hours. I decided to give it a try. On weekdays I usually have a lot of things I need to answer, so I tried to turn my phone off for an entire Sunday. I am not someone that invests a lot of time in social media, so that wasn’t difficult. However, after only a few hours I had to turn my phone on again because I had to drive somewhere and didn’t want to get lost. Whoops, I guess I really can’t live without Google Maps.

Fortunately, we didn’t only focus on the negative impacts of technology, but also looked at the good things it brought us. Like being able to connect with people during this pandemic. How would we survive this pandemic without our beautiful digital word? This again, is something I am also grateful for.

Lastly, we had the “Sustainability” theme. At first I kind of thought that it would be very standard. Around us we hear a lot about the importance of sustainability and I really thought it would be similar to what I already knew, but it turned out to be more interesting than I expected. The focus was laid on the plastic problem we all have heard of in some way. I always thought it would be alright as long as I throw my waste in a bin and separate it. But there were a few things that I was quite shocked about. I found out that a lot of plastic isn’t even being recycled because it is more expensive to recycle plastic than to produce more of it. Furthermore, a lot of companies look, of course, from a profit motive, so they decide to keep using the newly made plastic which causes the amount of plastic on our planet to keep increasing. Nowadays, only below 10% of all plastic is being recycled. So now I am trying to buy less plastic things whenever I can, and look if there are brands that use recycled plastic instead. But for a student like me, and I think a lot of people with me, these types of products are just too expensive. I really hope for this to change in the future, but it still is a major challenge.

All in all, the course was a really good way to get out of my own bubble and get to know new people from different backgrounds. Getting out of your comfort zone is a good way to explore what you like.