If you were to look up what a human is right now, it would come up that the definition of a human is a human being, or a person that is not an animal or an alien. This definition, while correct, is the last thing that I think of when I think of a human. When I think of what it means to be a human, I think of a cluster of things. To be a human means to hold and convey emotions. To be human means to possess certain characteristics that make someone the person they are. To be human means to coexist with other humans. Let me elaborate.
Emotions are essential in being human. They're our main form of both verbal and nonverbal communication and something that every human has in common. While we may not all possess the same exact emotion at the same exact time, we're always expressing some emotion and picking up on the emotions that others are expressing. That last sentence seems really repetitive, but I'm just trying to make sense. Being human means to be able to feel happiness or sadness or anger or pride etc whether you're a 6-year old caucasian girl from Milwaukee or a 43-year old Tibetan monk on the other side of the world. Feelings are always going to be universal.
Another big thing in being human is that there are these core characteristics that we all have if you strip away alot of our layers. At our core, humans all have some sense of good & evil and some sense of an underlying moral code. While this may mean something completely different for each person, it's still there. We all also have this natural need for rituals, rites, and ceremonies that are specific to our cultures and upbringings. As diverse as humans are, we all hold these sacred.
Humans also have this underlying urge to coexist. As much as someone may be an introvert or spend a lot of time in solitude, at the end of the day, they need some form of human interaction to get through their lives. As humans, we turn to each other, sometimes without even realizing it. We feed off of each other's emotions and share our emotions both verbally and nonverbally. Part of being human is our need to come together and subconsciously find the answers to all the questions we encounter with our existence. Being human is our ability to figure out exactly what makes us who we are.
This was a good blog post! I liked how you talked about human's urge to coexist and emotionally connect with other people. But, what about psychopaths or people who can't feel emotion? Does this make them less human? Those are hard questions to answer because people like that are usually labeled "inhumane", which basically means not human. Anyways, I liked how you ended your post about how humans are trying to figure out what makes us who we are... I wonder if there will ever be an answer to that. And, if we ever do answer it, will we then be less human?
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