Abstract
Positivity doesn't exist without negativity. One defines other, one doesn’t exist without another. In modern times, where a way of living accommodates mankind and its consumeristic needs, our lives become “better and easier”. But is that good for us? Even with all the progress of the human race, we are becoming more alienated day by day. We are closer to each other but we do not feel closeness. Chasing what we call happiness, looking only for the positive, we are forgetting about the necessity and importance of the negative. I want to show that “big” things do not exist without “small” things and that they are all of the same importance. I’m not inventing anything new, unclear or unfamiliar. I want to present things that I see around me. Simple daily things, but the ones that are often forgotten in the era we live in. I want to emphasise the importance of vulnerability, that everything you feel is common to me, because I’m a human too. To err is human, but what makes us human is our learning from mistakes. Happiness is not a definite place that we are going to find. It is a journey including both bad and good stops. Happiness depends on the way we perceive and balance all our experiences.
This work is a result of two-year research, however, I’m finalising it in a time of COVID-19 pandemic. I can see that those moments of humanity can be seen now, in hard times. The more we are in trouble, the more we start to reconnect with one another. We reconnect to ourselves and we reconnect to our humanity. It feels like this forced distance is making us closer. When we were physically close, we were distanced and disconnected. Now when we have a physical distance between us, we are closer than ever before. Why? Because we share. We share the same problem, and we look upon other human beings the same way we look upon our selves.