Utopia for a week?

I have a question, how was your agora week? Did you have fun? Was it relaxing to not do "academic" work for a week or did you miss the rigorous activity of ordinary school life? Do you wish it was longer or shorter? As you contemplate these, here are my opinions.

I am a senior at Uni and Agora days have always been a part of life here. I remember when I was younger how my brother would get home from the agora week and tell tales of different classes he would take. Video games, cooking, capture the flag, and much more, all of this sounded amazing to me and really made me want to go to this school. After I got into Uni I realized how amazing it really was. I felt as if I had a lot of freedom in what I took (despite the limited options a subbie has) and was very excited for my classes. I took classes that I chose and because of that I found pleasure in learning and tried my hardest to learn as much as I could. This brings me to this point that if one chooses exactly what they want to do, something they enjoy doing, would they be able to learn better? You might find a passion and work with said passion until you master it. It sort of makes the saying "the sky's the limit" more of a reality. With the world we live in now-a-days a lot of  people don't have enough time to truly follow what they want to do, whether it's painting, music, sports, math, you get the point. However if agora week were to be say 2 weeks maybe you would have a better chance to learn more about your preferred subject as well as yourself. Just some food for thought.

Remember Uni is a unique place with many opportunities and one should try to take of advantage of the freedom of this place. Whether it's campus or agora week, try and find something you love and go deeper. This sort of turned into a pep talk so I'll wrap it up. Basically would you think a school that focuses on ones passion would be a good idea or would it all crash and burn? Let me know.

Would you take soma?

In A Brave New World, soma is a crucial and interesting part of the society. Soma, although widely used in the society, can be considered both beneficial and detrimental. On the one hand, as Bernard and John the Savage have said before, it creates a fabricated sense of happiness. Otherwise, people love soma because it brings them bliss and happiness taking small amounts of it regularly. I wanted to talk about the benefits and downsides of soma in this society.

First some background, soma is like a drug coming in small (usually half-gram) tablets. The characters often describe soma as something “delicious”. Lenina and Henry have taken soma alongside coffee. During the Ford service, they indulged in a “loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma” which to be honest sounds pretty good. In these examples, soma is almost demonstrated to be like a dessert. In terms of its effect, every time anyone is feeling unhappy or discontent, they are encouraged to take some soma. “half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon”. Soma is so potent that it can take people on literal “vacations” and stifle any negative feelings. Like when Bernard said that “after two grammes of soma the joke seemed, for some reason, good”.

Soma is basically a highly potent drug. In A Brave New World’s society, there is no negative stigma or persecution that comes with the use of soma unlike the drug scene in the US. I wonder whether this openness to using soma makes people happier when they use it because they don’t have to worry about adverse consequences. This reminds me of a relatively new policy in Norway in which they decriminalized drug use. The government set up drug administering stations and even sent people home with manageable amounts of drugs. This led to a drastic decrease in crime, overdoses, and I would guess probably a higher satisfaction rate from those using the drugs as well. I wonder whether the openness to soma in this society is part of the reason soma is beneficial to the citizens. I think that the fact that people can choose to constantly stay in the euphoric state is largely beneficial for the society because it demotivates other modes of relieving negative emotions like anger and hate. This can help alleviate potential conflicts and keep everyone’s satisfaction relatively high. It could also be argued, however, that the constant use of soma can bring people to become desensitized to happiness. If people are constantly using soma to keep themselves in a euphoric state, people are going to crave more beyond the existing feeling of soma. What do you think? Is soma the ultimate solution to societies happiness or actually causing adverse consequences?