Transcriber: Iolanda Maria La Notte Reviewer: Ilayda Gokgoz
Have you ever found yourself stuck in a rut?
Getting out of bed, going to school, work.
Go home, go to bed, and then repeat. At the end of the day
lying in bed, scrolling over your phone and then realize.
Another day has passed.
And I scarcely did any accomplishment at all. Everything was exactly
the same as yesterday.
And I scarcely made any difference. Now the world we live in
is an amazing, ever changing world that’s packed of opportunities.
Millions of online resources provided by some of the top universities
around the world, different activities available for us to try it out
and cool people like world leaders and scientists
and artists showing to us about their own experience in lectures.
However, I somehow managed
to perfectly avoid all of these opportunities,
like in a dodgeball game. All I did was walk into a classroom,
sit there like a little chick waiting for Mummy Bird to feed me stuff,
clatter my waist and tell me what to do. Now, why are we doing that?
A famous psychological term might explain
and shed some light into this comfort zone,
which was coined by management theorist Alasdair Whyte states that there is
a psychological state in which we feel comfortable,
experience low level of stress and anxiety
and has control over our environment.
Now, when I think of comfort zone,
what I always think of is a little turtle shell that wraps around me like
a warm blanket that gives me a sense of assurance and security.
We feel comfortable this way
because we have control over our familiar environment and knows whatever’s going on.
This feels natural to us
because human instinct is to pursue comfort and happiness,
which makes it really hard to give up, even if we say we wanted to.
Now, of course, there are also other reasons.
It turns out uncertainty can be really hard on our brain.
A study published on Nature finds out that uncertainty disrupts many of
the habitual psychological process happening in our brain,
which creates outsized emotional response to negative experiences in human language.
It says uncertainty can be like fuel for worry and
an amplifier that expands whatever negative feeling we have.
Trying new things can be very scary
and sometimes it's just easier to stay put and avoid trying altogether.
Of course, there are also the case in which we can be simply oblivious of
the fact that there's a whole new field out there waiting for us to explore.
The famous Greek philosopher Socrates once proposed a theory,
The Allegory of The Cave, which describes
a group of people that has lived their whole lives chained
against the wall of a cave. Now, these people, they have lived
their whole life in that cave. So they’ve never walked out.
They're simply unaware of the entire world out there.
For them, the cave is the entire world.
The world we live in is such
a diverse place that no matter how large we expand our consciousness,
there are always something new out of our reach that is waiting for us to explore.
So I suggest we make a change to reintroduce new experiences
and embrace changes because we have to come to
an understanding to those obstacles that are blocking us from becoming
the best of ourselves and grow out of it. Thank you.
(Applause)