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World Emoji Day 2024
Today is World Emoji Day. So tell me, are you feeling 😁 or 😖?
🤩 Emojis 🤩
emoji
noun | emo·ji | \ ē-ˈmō-jē \
A small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion.
Origin: Japanese, from e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’. ~Em😄ji Timeline
I use them shamelessly and I’m not sad about it. I will continue to do so unapologetically.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a well-placed emoji is worth at least a dozen.
Why do I like to abuse the privilege of using emojis anywhere and everywhere I can?
Because they’re fun! Y’all, I’m 57. How much fun do you think I get to have these days?
They’re fun and they express what I’m thinking. What more can you ask from a tiny little picture in the middle of your sentence?
🤔 What Are They? 🧐
What is an Emoji? | World Emoji Day for Kids 😃😂🙈😍
Of all the innocuous inventions of the computer age, emojis are easy to overlook. They’re just there in every messaging app and you can embed them into your web pages as I frequently do.
Also, you can eat them if you want to. In fact, you can get M&M’s that look a lot like the ones in the video.
As much as I enjoy and thoroughly overuse them, I still consider Cut & Paste to be the most amazingly useful invention in my lifetime.
The internal combustion engines that have driven me as far as Miami, Florida, and airplanes that have taken me as far as Moscow, Russia, are nothing short of miraculous. My life wouldn’t be the same without them.
Microwaves, air fryers, MRE’s, self-heating dinners and shelf-stable foods have saved me hours of cook time. A watched kettle never whistles.
But when it comes to Cut & Paste, this simple pair of keystrokes have saved me years of my life. Without a shadow of a doubt, the infinite freedom to move words, sentences, paragraphs and pages of information around at will is something I could not picture my life without.
What’s the alternative? 🤦🏻♂️ Been there. Done that. Picture an electric typewriter perched on our kitchen table, thundering with every keystroke. Then it happens…
The dreaded mistype. A misspelled word or awkward turn of phrase. What to do?
You could just yeet the paper and start over on a new sheet or you could (if you’ve got a fancy typewriter like I had) back up and type over the error with the correction ribbon.
I don’t think you can picture this if you’re not old enough to have seen one.
The typewriter had a black ribbon imbued with ink to register the keystroke and a white ribbon that basically had a coating of coagulated Wite-Out on it. Great, right?
Well, smacking a key down over your mistype transferred this substance onto the page much as you’d think. It was 3D. It was a meteor strike of spackle on your page.
If you had a lot of corrections to make, you were going to have a page full of crusty overstrikes. It was absolutely nuts, in retrospect.
There was another alternative, but it required patience that wasn’t generally available to a high school kid.
You could get your bottle of Wite-Out and go all Bob Ross on your mistakes, but then you’d have to wait until it dried before you could go back and make your corrections.
Even with this approach, your page gained about 25% extra weight from the broad strokes of the correction fluid.
I shudder. I truly do.
Nowadays, we can slice, dice, fricassee and reorder our words on the page, wherever and however we want.
Now that’s progress…
😸 Beyond The Smiley Face 😸
I’m trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do. ~Martin Seligman
It’s good to be happy.
I’ve heard that other cultures look down on Westerners for our desire for happiness. Maybe they think it’s weak or decadent or whatever.
Maybe it’s how we present it.
People, for the most part, just want to live their lives. People want to do what they feel some sense of personal satisfaction from or resonance with. People want to have their personal space, their distinctive stuff and their circle of friends or loved ones.
Way down deep inside, people just want to be “happy”. However you choose to define that, we want to have things in such a way as to make us feel that all is well in the world.
That can take a lot of features.
Some people would be perfectly happy hanging out 24×7 at the church / temple / mosque / whatever rocking out in the religious zeal of it all.
Some people are happy to work their asses off at some back-breaking job all week, go home and guzzle a six-pack or go to the strip club to get their hormones readjusted.
Some people are content to live simply in a humble household, eating regular fare, watching TV or reading books and just enjoying the company of friends and/or family.
There are about nine billion definitions of “happiness”.
What we ought to do to enhance overall happiness is to retool society to facilitate individual satisfaction.
If your best life is to be a writer, you should be able to make a living being a writer.
If your best life is to be a potter, you should be able to make a living making pottery.
Yes, I remember the quip from Office Space where Michael Bolton says that the classic guidance counselor question, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do?” is bullshit because nobody would be janitors.
That’s not entirely true. Some people get a great sense of professional satisfaction from keeping a facility clean and presentable. Actually, lots of people do. I’ve met some.
People can be happy being janitors, if that’s the kind of person they are. Lots of people are unhappy being janitors because that doesn’t resonate with them.
In the middle, there are people who couldn’t care less. The work they do for the money they need to do what they want to do in their free time is utterly indifferent to them.
These people can do whatever comes their way and be indifferent to the work that is a dream come true for some and hell on 🌎🌍🌏 for others.
There is room for everyone’s kind of happiness as long as that doesn’t infringe on other people’s happiness.
Actually, the best kind of happiness is the kind that makes other people happy because you’re happy doing what you do.
Go to a restaurant where the proprietor is really excited about making the food they serve. The enthusiasm is infectious and the food is heavily flavored with the happiness of having made it.
That’s the kind of happiness we need. People need to know what their happy place is and they need to be able to get there.
Mental health will improve throughout society when people are empowered to be who they were born to be.
Neofeudalism is not the answer. It’s not the future. It makes a rare few “happy” to make everyone else miserable. They can go fuck themselves.
On the other side, there are people who believe that we are on the cusp of Artificial Super Intelligence. Futurists believe that all the crap that nobody really wants to do will be completely automated and we’ll either be subject to a Blade Runner-style dystopia or an almost unimaginable utopia.
Reality typically falls somewhere in between and the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. Guess we’ll see…
That’s all for today. 👋🏻 Have a lovely 🌞 Summer 🐪 Hump 🐫 Day 🔥 and don’t refrain from using those emojis 😊.