Yahtzee, a dangerous game?

Last two weeks were full of exams and that always means lots of stress, trying to remember the most important things. And thinking all the time: "If I were the professor, what should I ask...". Unfortunately what I think the professors will ask is not always correct. Somehow the questions always contain something you just missed while reading. Well that's how it is, college life, always interesting.

But that is not the topic I wanted to write about. Do you know the game of Yahtzee? It's a game in which you don't have to think a lot, you just need to throw five dice. You need to make different combinations, which have special names and you have three chances of throwing those five dice to achieve a combination. In short how the game works. I'm not really a person who likes games that much, but as my sister convinced me I had to destress from my exams, I thought I could give it a try.

At start I thought it was quite relaxing, you don't need to think, just play. But after a while we became more fanatic. You can get the highest points when you throw a combination with five same numbers, so that became our goal. Luck wasn't on our side. We decided to do a competition: throw as many times as you want, but in the end you need to get the combination of five same numbers. First chance: I made it in 12 times, my sister in 14. Second chance: I in 8 times, my sister in 11. We became better and better!

Next time I wanted to try to improve my score I suddenly remembered my Psychiatry lectures on addiction and gambling. Yahtzee is a game of luck, so are other games of gambling. Addiction starts most of the time with some stimulus that you want to repeat your action and that gives you satisfaction. I won't go into details, but after a while you need a bigger stimulus to reach the same satisfaction. And it all started so innocent...

With the dice still in my hands I said: "O well, what's the point, it's just a game, not worth waisting my time on". Looking at each other I knew we were thinking the same. What were we lucky when dad called us to do the dishes ;)! With a big smile my sister said "Good we couldn't finish the game, it could've got addictive".

So the moral of this story: be careful with what games you play! Well that counts for everything actually haha. I just wanted to share something random.

Life is a lesson and lessons for life, too young to start with?

Last few months I suddenly got the strong urge to start reading inspirational and management books. They give me food for thought, about my life, about myself, people I love and lot more. I felt that now the time has come to start to know myself. Get to know what I really want to do in my life. What do I expect from my life and am I living it the way I want. I believe I’m here on this earth for a purpose and that it’s important I will search for what that purpose is.

I suppose almost everyone has such a moment in their lives that they start asking themselves such questions. But should we wait for that critical moment to come? There will also be people who will never think about these matters. All those important life lessons I learn from these amazing books will be a secret for these people forever. This made me wondering why teaching these so-called life lessons isn’t integrated in our school or college curricula.
Should life lessons be taught at schools or colleges?

You can discuss a lot about this question. One argument against the option is that everyone has a different opinion about how one should live his of her life. And that people don’t want to think about it. But I think it cannot do any harm trying to think about what life is and that we should appreciate it.

Another point is lack of time at schools and colleges. Time is considered very important and I can imagine schools and colleges believe life lessons should be learned in own time or at home. I don’t know if I should agree on the lack of time, because if one really wants you can make time for it. And talking about life lessons at schools or colleges is in my opinion way better, because everyone comes from a different environment, which makes the discussion on these topics even more interesting.

Others will ask you why you don’t choose the subject of Philosophy, which is given at some schools, to discuss this kind of questions. I don’t think one can reach really every student with this subject, because very often the matter studied in these classes is quite difficult, whilst just talking about life and life lessons from great and wise people can be done in a very easy way.

One option I also would like, to then just start a club or society within schools or colleges in which you can discuss about this all and give each other lectures on subjects etc. It will improve our spiritual and intellectual development a lot!

I don’t know in what way life lessons already have been implemented in other schools and/or colleges. But I have not seen something like life lessons, or just how to handle problems in life, being taught at an educational institution till today.

I think it should be taught at schools or colleges and hopefully this will happen somewhere in the future, for the benefit of us all.

Capturing Memories

Why is it that we want to capture almost everything around us, to keep it as a memory?
Probably our biological hard disks, our brains, alone are not enough to save everything we do and want to remember. On the other hand we have memories we would love to erase if we could, bad or shameful experiences. Sometimes we are not able to make ourselves forget those memories.

From the prehistoric times on humans started to make cave paintings. Drawings and paintings have been important tools to keep memories. One of the other media was through memorizing songs or poems in order to pass important information on to younger generations. When we learned how to write, we started keeping diaries and writing books. In this way we could share our memories with an even bigger audience. From last few centuries on things went very fast. When photography and film cameras came, we were able to capture every tiny detail of our lives. When you go to a birthday party, on a dinner, on holiday and so on, we always carry our photo cameras. If we don’t have those, we at least have our cell phones with build in photo cameras. So not to worry, anywhere we have the opportunity to capture that memory. And what to say about this blog? This is capturing a memory too. With computer technology introducing the Internet to us, explosions of memories have been fired; they grew like weed and invaded the Internet like germs. There is zero wastage of memory. Is that the way we want it?

In fact our whole history is one big memory. We want to use memories to learn things from the past, to remember how we should do things, how much progression and evolution has been taken place from time to time. Most of the time we want to have our memories so we don’t forget what good moments we shared in our lives. Our precious memories, the whole process of capturing them in our brains or with other media, it still seems all very magical to me.

First post, first rubbish?

In my first post I could be explaining why I started this blog or what this blog will be about.

But this will not be the case. It is better to keep all of you in suspense.

It could be any reason. Maybe I’m just a copycat who thinks that when almost everyone nowadays has a blog, I should have one too. Or I’m a very bored college student who just out of boredom starts this blog. There is a chance I secretly hope some famous person will love my posts and discovers my writing talent and I will gain fame too. You can also think that as a non-native English speaker I am just trying to improve my English writing this blog.

Will this be a diary, a news magazine, a random rubbish bin for notes that aren’t worth keeping, what kind of people will be interested in reading all this?

Well, I don’t know. But I will try to regularly write something about interesting topics. It will definitely not be rubbish! Read the pieces open-minded, don’t think too much about it and then decide what your opinion will be. I’ll be looking forward to your reactions.