The High Price of Materialism

This piece written by Tim Kasser is meant to assess people on their personal values.  Kasser summarized his results from his studies by concluding that people who value wealth and are materialistic are generally reported to have a lower state of well-being than those who have different values.  Just as the famous saying states, “money can’t buy you happiness.”  Table 1 was used to evaluate materialistic value by measuring how important financial success, self-acceptance, affiliation, and community feeling are to the survey participants.  If a person is always concerned with what materialistic items they possess, they are not able to enjoy the intangible things in life; such as family, friends, and their community.  Results show people who are more materialistic have lower levels of vitality and higher levels of depression and anxiety.  Assessing not only college students, but also a wide range of 18 year olds with diverse life situations, further proves that materialism is unhealthy.  It was interesting to learn the results of how having certain values can affect your state of well-being.  However for the most part I found this piece of writing to be pretty boring to read.  I felt Tim Kasser sort of elongated his findings from his Aspiration Index and came off as repetitive at times.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

I feel as if the French teacher was a little too harsh on her students.  After all it was the first day of class and some students were nervous.  Her comments back to each student’s introduction were sort of rude and uncalled for.  The teacher obviously embarrassed the first Anna.   The teacher was kind of acting like a smartass to her students, which in my opinion is unprofessional and the wrong impression to make to the class.  I could relate to the part where David mentions when he assigned the wrong gender to both the floor waxer and the typewriter.  I took Spanish all four years in high school and determining the appropriate gender doesn’t always come easily.  It tends to get confusing and as David mentions, why should we assign a gender to an inanimate object?  It is strange and hard to decide which objects are what gender.  David resulted in feeling discouraged by his teacher’s criticism and also felt uncomfortable when it involved speaking to others.  Practice is really the one and only way to learn a new language.  David proves that this technique pays off when he mentions the sense of relief he feels after he is able to at least UNDERSTAND french.