Pleasure & Philanthropy Tasks

Hey everyone! This week’s topic was on Positive Psychology and the benefits of it. Positive Psychology is the scientific study of human flourishing. The task given to us was to embark on two planned activities, one to bring pleasure to yourself and the other as a philanthropic task that would improve someone else’s well-being.   

            

       Well for my pleasure task, to start I went home this weekend so just being at home after not having seen my family for a month gave me a good start for my task. I also talked my boyfriend into coming home with me to see his family. On Saturday, we started the task off by taking some bluebonnet photos because I really love photography. I have always loved taking photos of other people, so I just enlisted my family, my boyfriend Jacob, and my sister’s boyfriend Ian, to be

my models. Everyone really liked how their photos turned out so that only made that part of my day even better. After that I had planned for us to all go to eat at one of my favorite restaurants. While we were there we also got some time to just talk and catch up with each other. We finished our night off with a late-night movie, Infinity Wars. We were all excited to see it and it was definitely a good way to end a great day.

       For my philanthropic task, while I was also home, I had planned to go see one of my good friends Sarah Hatcher. I knew she had been feeling down and has been going through some stuff lately. I also know that it is the end of the year and having some encouragement would be good for her right now. Not only all of that, but I had missed her, and she had missed me, so it was defiantly time to see her again. I knew she was going to be at a track meet all day, so I went and surprised her there. She talked about what had been going on in her life recently; I listened and tried to just be there with her.  Sarah said, “Seeing you was fantastic and it made me really happy, I never get to see you and I didn’t know you were coming so I was really surprised and excited!”

      These posts were similar in the way that even though only one of the tasks was intentionally supposed to bring me pleasure, both of the tasks brought me so much pleasure. I did not even have to really do anything with my family to have a great time and find pleasure in that, just being with them was really enough for me. One of the main differences for the philanthropic task, since I was doing something for someone else, I had to work with their schedule. It would have been nice if I was able to take Sarah out to eat or to a movie, but since she had already dedicated her time to the track meet we just had to work with what we had. But we can have a great time together anywhere, so it did not really matter.