🎀🌸🗒💻💕📖

JONATHAN HORWITZ

ig: meyloetta

whats the deal with the stigma around giving up anyway. yeah this is hard so i do not want to do it anymore. we don’t keep our hand inside a burning flame just to feel like a martyr. i’m off to get a milkshake 

person w adhd experiencing symptoms of adhd: why the fuck can’t I do this thing . I wish there was some explanation for this

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

this is how i feel about the new jupiter photos btw

tips for applying to colleges as a 21 year old?

Apply using the Coalition Application to save money and take special care to apply to colleges that have no application fee outside of the Coalition App. Go out of your way to apply to as many places as you possibly can and just have fun with your applications. I would apply to a variety of large state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges and have a huge mix going on so that your application pool is large and relatively varied. Apply to some huge SEC schools, apply to some cute liberal arts schools, apply to colleges with a few great scholarships, apply to colleges that you idolise, take the time to just have fun and apply all over the map. I applied to the American University of Bulgaria just for the thrill of it and I don’t regret a single application. Most colleges consider January 15th the last day to do applications but some have rolling admissions so try to get on that right now and get to applying to schools.

Don’t be afraid to move far and start anew, there’s nothing like a fresh beginning and you can be whoever you want to be. There’s no shame in moving away and getting away from your old reputation and recreating yourself, there’s no shame in making new friends and forgetting that you used to be shy and fearful, and there’s no shame in taking full advantage of all of your new opportunities. There’s no reason why you should refrain from moving and becoming your best self in a brand new city and making the choice to become who you were always meant to be and enjoying your life. I know so many women who had total glow ups and took the time to get thin, change their style, and fix what was hurt upstairs before they went to college as older students and I’ve seen how they’ve succeeded and actually ended up giving life another fair chance.

Apply for all of the grants and scholarships that you possibly can so you’ll have an excess. I used to apply for a huge amount of scholarships just so I could have an excess and spend it on the things that I wanted and so I could use my scholarship money to help fill out my savings account and offset my cost of living. If you get scholarships and you already have your tuition on lock, a lot of the time the money will just be given to you in check form, same with grants. I used to use the money that I got from grants to buy clothes and travel just so that I could continue improving my quality of life. Life is for living and college is for fun and if you have the ability to win scholarships and grants, some of the funds should be used for your own enjoyment and your savings account, not everything should be so serious.

Rush a sorority. I’m telling you. Rushing a sorority truly changed my life and has given me friends and so many opportunities that I would have never had had I not chosen to go through rush. My sorority has changed me and changed my life, it’s given me purpose, and it’s helped me get so many career opportunities and become friends with women who I literally would not be able to survive without. My sorority has given me access to so many things, I’ve been able to learn so much, I was helped with scholarships and with learning better English, my sorority has helped me through the hard parts of life, I’ve been able to learn and experience history, I regret not going to a school that gave me the ability to Go Greek for four years and have that family. I’m constantly recommending that women go through rush and I would strongly recommend that any older first year at university go through rush just so that she could have the ability to make friends and have all of the same benefits that I’ve been blessed enough to have. I’d consider Going Greek my best decision ever.

Go on tours!! So many colleges give you the chance to tour free, so many are easily accessible, and so many are accessible with minimal money spent and so my advice is to try to tour all of your top colleges and get a feel for where you want to be. Tours, having the opportunity to experience a college, and having the ability to see the campus and witness the culture are really what can make or break your decision. I’m a huge proponent of trying to go somewhere and trying to see what’s up before you make the decision to spend four years in said place. Going on tours helped me, I got to meet cool new people and have even cooler walks on the campuses where I went, and I got to have the time on campus that helped me decide if the university was for me or not. I did this with the schools I applied to for my year abroad and for my actual undergraduate uni and I had the ability to fall in love with both campuses. Tours are an essential part of applying to colleges and I would highly recommend doing affordable uni tours.