GMU:Thinking In Tanks/Dominik Kämmer

Dominik Kämmer

Medienkunst / Mediengestaltung

I want to welcome you to my Wiki post about my inner findings, my "progression" with this course and notes I take during our meetings.

Plan of the course

• one week talking about a topic
• one week talking about the progress
• constantly writing in the Wiki
• formulate project idea until end of the year
• submit an art work and reflect on it until the start of the next semester
• use the alter ego as a strategy to reflect your mindset
• self motivated working

Structur (in order of time)

1.First reflection on my personality and background
2.Social and political trains of thought
3.Mental Traps
4.Topic: communticated reality vs. “actual“ reality
5.Project Ideas
6.Topic: consuming vs. gratefulness

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1. First reflection on my personality and background
I'm dominated by a strong believe in freedom of speech and that a lot needs to be changed to save our environement and with that life in general.

Believes
From my understanding, nearly all people strive to make the world a "better" place in general, whether it's for them personally, for others/humanity or both. Some succeed and some fail to push even harder. The methods we use to get there are mainly determined by our background and personal experiences.

Summary
I think it's important to have a look at our past to reflect our goals, methods and human body, for us to understand how we can make the world a "better" or even good place in the long term.

Background
I had a very stable and wealthy childhood in a small town in east germany and was raised in lovbe by christian parents. Both were hold of typical gender roles while I did’t feel like anything was forced. In high school I experienced how strong the background of my class mates shaped their behaviour. Finding out about (mainly positive) core values, that didn’t line up with behaviour towards me, that resultated as a reaction to their parents house. My interest for environemental protection was raised by my sister at the age of 15 when I tried to live vegetarian in the hope of less animals suffering.

Hopes
My hope is to better understand my patterns/traps of thought and understand others way of life, to find out what messages I really want to convey with the videos/films I aim at producing in the future right now.

I'm excited to take this journey.

Here is my Fridays for Future “propaganda video“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePRzkMmE73A&feature=youtu.be

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2. Second reflection, social and political trains of thought
Terms that could descibe me

• compassionate (mitfühlend)
• peaceful
• attentive
• aktive listener
• humble
• perfectionist

So I want to explain you some of my characteristics and the way I think about us as human beings. All of the following I’m saying is purely based on my inner findings and can have contradictions in themselves. From my point of view nobody should be socially downgraded for any kind of behaviour that doesn’t harm others. A general tollerance towards everything unknown or knew seems key to me. As I already wrote in the wiki, all people seem have their individual experiences and background that lead to their behaviour. Inner violence shouldn’t play any active roll in our civilized society. „We“ in general should be more positive about our relationships and open minded about small things in life and doing so called weird stuff. In my opinion „cool“ groups of people mainly emerged from a narrow mind, prejudice and insecurities in cohibitance, that lead to people hiding their emotions and suppressing others to not be suppressed themselves.

I’m a very thoughtfull person, that spends a lot of time in it’s own head and is searching for a perfection in lifestyle while analizing others. There needs to be a equal weight between time to work and to relax with joy in every one of them and a clear seperation. The strive for endless perfection and happyness is one that I know is out of reach, but motivates me to continue and gives my life a drive. I often feel dominated by quite moody phases of up and down. This is kind of driving me crazy at the moment and it conquers the ideal of perfection and thinking that my outcome is mainly based on what I do. Even though I firmly believe in god and a sort of perfect life that receives us after our being on earth, I often forget about it and feel at the mercy of fate (dem Schicksal ausgeliefert) instead of secured in it. Most of the time I’m very introverte and analyze what other people are saying, but in comfortable fellowship I can be quite an extovert or even intrusive. I don’t think that money people happier, because many rich people are lonely and most humans feel salvaged in a company. To some extend wealth gives us possibilities to spend our time a certain way, but often won’t better times quality in the long term. Nature as the place we are intended to live in means a lot to me and with that it‘s important to protect it from destruction. It’s a place where I sometimes just like to just listen to my quiet soroundings to really be energized again for taskes I pushed ahead of me. In general I see myself a bit towards the political left wing, but I’d like to call me center because i understand both sides and think that none of the extrems would be good to us. From a political standpoint I’m a bit disappointed, that parties nowdays strongly represent groups of people which are based on prosperity and age instead of general values that apply to all of them equally. Because we don’t really learn how the capitalist system works with all the ins and outs, it plays against us. Financially poor fights against rich, young against old and we destroy each other instead of revealing our cards to find the best for everyone. Life becomes a race and we don’t enjoy our way.

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3. Mental traps
Sometimes I:

• overestimate my household work compared to others because it feels easier to live a „victim role“ and do less.
• lose myself on social media platforms because consuming is easier and gives a quick dopamine kick even though it makes demotivates me or makes me sad.
• compare my life to the way other people present theirs. I know that you can’t really compare the conditions and success or being the “best“ doesn’t bring you happyness. You can’t really turn off your emotions though.
• give tipps to people in the thinking of handling it better while actually doing worse and giving tipps to myself.
• shrink back from the word “work“ because I saw people hating THEIR work instead of loving the process to create stuff. Maybe that’s why people call themselves “creatives“ instead of workers.
• postpone simple tasks in front of me thinking it would become easier.
• think of radically changing my life for the better by a simple thought but fail after the first days.
• rely too much on my mood entering a state of being demotivated to do anything. (relying on willpower instead of habits)

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4. Topic communticated reality vs “actual“ reality
Notes:

• conflict with my own video
• clickbait and overconfidence for success vs valueable content that supports your mindset
• conversation with a youtuber yesterday: His aim is to maximize his following while mine was to share my findings no matter how successful.
• good pitching of ideas vs looking at the idea instead of the way it’s communicated
• conflict commercial projects where it is necassary and the values of not judging others for their way of speaking
• trump convinced many people with words even though his message was dangerous and unstable
• rhetoric is a skill, but there are different settings to use it
• when communicating what our goals are we make our self vulnerable but it can lead to compromises that include more people → more peaceful and democratic
• on social media things have become less profound and people hide their intents (e.g. we only show our best work and we make money from influencing people to buy products)
• the algorithm dictates how successful you are with your outcome
• people create characters that doesn’t display their real identity anymore and get impacted by the these types of characters of people
• it empowers you to spread your thinking and to build groups that are contrary to other
• it’s kind of unbelievable for me that people don’t reflect on themself

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5. Project Ideas

• Videocampaign against “group-focused enmity“
• concept world in Unity to give an understanding of what our future life could be in a good (and bad) way

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6. Topic: consuming vs. gratefulness
By putting more effort into the way I dress I noticed feeling more insecure in the way I behave and move. It is kind of the same for everything I buy now because it tells my brain that I am not enough the way I am and live. I spend money instead of saving it while feeling less confident in the end.
In the long term upgrading things like cameras might give you benefits when it comes to outer quality but learning how to make the best out of what you got will make you smarter, happier with what you got and even more capable of working with better gear later on.

So that is basically why don't like the mindset of shopping as much and having to decide what to buy. This might be a cause why capitalism and buying stuff does not make us happiere even though we seek for those things when watching adds and seeing others have this one "magical thing". It makes us be more superficial comparing to the outer appearance of others and has the potential to limits our productivity in fear of doing things wrong not live up to the standards of others.
And yes, from time to time it can be quite fun to look for stuff just like every activity we do.

I'm persoally quite happy with this type of consuming not making me happier because I strive for a environemantally healthier humanity where it is more about minimalism and quality not quantity.