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wilburzel's avatar

Do you agree- life's full of opposites?

Asked by wilburzel (17points) February 27th, 2009

…and everyone has to accept the fact that life is not just about good times and being happy. We have to learn to face bad times too.

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22 Answers

Bluefreedom's avatar

Just like Yin and Yang – it’s used to describe how seemingly disjunct or opposing forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, giving rise to each other in turn.

cak's avatar

Yep. Seems like that’s how things go.

aprilsimnel's avatar

NO!

RAINBOWS! All the time sunshine and rainbows! With ice cream and cake! And fat-bellied puppies and kittens to snorgle! Fountains of grape Fanta! Singing into a hairbrush with all your BFFs to Duran Duran!

And cute boys who don’t speak!
/dreams that died at 12

Of course you need the opposites or you can’t appreciate anything about the experience of living.

cak's avatar

@aprilsimnel – I loved John Taylor.

anne09's avatar

Not all the time….....sometime

essieness's avatar

Life wouldn’t be fulfilling without the bad times. Sure, we enjoy the good times, but the bad times are what help us to appreciate them.

bigbanana's avatar

Just going to say that. Yin and Yang, you can’t know the good without knowing the bad.

jonsblond's avatar

“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have
The Facts of Life, The Facts of Life”

kevinhardy's avatar

well my fmaily doesnt support me or my hobbies and im drug free

cdwccrn's avatar

A time for every purpose under heaven.

fireside's avatar

I disagree, Life’s full of similarities.

SoapChef's avatar

There is no joy without sorrow.

hearkat's avatar

@cak: I’d have fought you for him!

wundayatta's avatar

I refuse to buy into the paradigm that says there are always two ends of a spectrum, and a straight line connects them. So, no. Life is not full of opposites because opposites don’t exist.

nebule's avatar

@daloon that wicked (as in good)... what do you replace the paradigm with?

wundayatta's avatar

Multi-dimensionality—the kind of thing that is difficult to represent in terms of three dimensional space, but, if you think of it as attributes, you can see how you get to multiple dimensions in an understandable way. Usually, we plot X vs Y. Two dimensions. Sometimes we go to X vs Y vs Z: three dimentions. However for most things about humans, whether we are looking at one part of personality (say intelligence) or the whole personality, there are so many aspects or attributes that they can not be plotted in three dimensional space.

I would argue that we’re all used to thinking in a multi-dimensional way; we just don’t realize that’s what we’re doing.

So, for example, is stupid the opposite of smart? It’s easy to think like that, but if you remember that your measurement of smart does not measure all aspects of smartness, then you can’t necessarily end up at stupid, because individuals have their own skills. You kind of have to take a left turn instead of continuing on the straight line.

ANother paradigm is that of circles. We tend to dismiss circular reasoning, but there are a lot of things where we end up back where we began if we keep following the path away from where we started. Think of color. Think of the relationship between sorting and counting activities.

I’m sure there are many other ways of looking at it, but that’s what I have.

nebule's avatar

oooh…. circular reasoning… going to have to look that one up… all v v v interesting… I’m struggling getting out of linear thin king and into multidimensional rather than 3d – i can’t seem to picture anything other than 3D… will do some research me thinks!

fireside's avatar

@lynneblundell – Here’s an interesting video about imagining beyond the third dimension.

wundayatta's avatar

@lynneblundell: I don’t try to think of it in more than three spatial dimensions. I just think of it as different attributes of a thing. Like people have height, weight, girth, and eye color. How do you plot interactions between all of those in 3D space? You don’t. But we do it all the time. we know there are many aspects to people, and we juggle them in our heads as we seek to understand each other. That’s all it is.

That idea has really helped me relax about the multidimensionality of the physical world. These other “dimensions” are attributes of the universe that are required to explain the behavior of the universe. No biggie.

nebule's avatar

@fireside thanks..that was interesting!

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