In this essay, I will outline my understanding and knowledge of human interaction both with my own personal real world experience as well as using a piece of fiction to reflect on the manner. Having worked several jobs since I was 17 years old, I have had the opportunity to work with a large variety of different and unique individuals. During this time not only did I learn to communicate and interact better and “come out of my shell” more, it allowed me to learn the importance of team work as well as the value of human interaction itself.
In the next paragraphs I will explain this more in detail in a way the hopefully meets the outcomes of understanding for the human relations course. Real World Experience In the past several years I have experienced many forms of human interaction. My first job was working for Canadian Tire, and going into this job as a very shy and laid back individual was very overwhelming at first. Things like good eye contact, clear speaking and having a relaxed and confident posture was something that was a huge struggle at first.
With changes in technology, human interaction has become even more of an issue than before. In my daily life I see it all around me, people attatched to cell phones and getting held up even in the smallest of conversations. I would say right now, technology itself is one of the biggest factors affecting human interaction as a whole. However, I would say that this not the only reasons. Before I got my job, I never had a cell phone and technology was not as big of a part of my life as it is now and I still struggled with interacting with people that were strangers to me.
As continued to work though, I began to obtain more confidence in myself as I begin to understand body language and practicing good eye contact and improving my overall posture. For years, I was always a shy and passive individual. What I learned through these experiences with working with my co-workers and dealing with larger sums of customers is that it is by far one of the best ways to improve your ability to interact with people.
As I’ve learned, despite the qualities of working a retail job, having a generally low wage, you simply cannot simulate the experience it provides for learning to interact with people on a one to one basis and dealing with a variety of different situations. The reason I see this experience as being both beneficial and relevant to my future career in IT industry is that I will be able to take my skills I have obtained from working several retail jobs and into the IT field itself.
These vital skills of communication, doing phone calls, and simply forcing myself to deal with individuals on one-on-one basis has taught me a lot of important life skills and improved myself as an individual as a whole in ways that simply can’t be matched. Learning the subjects and doing group work in other courses in the IT program has taught me that working in teams will be a big part of my career and applying the skills I’m obtaining now as well my prior experience can only help me going forward. Fictional Experience – Neon Genesis Evangelion
In my introduction, I mentioned I would include both a real world and fictional example of my understanding of human interaction. Interestingly the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the words “human interaction” is a widely popular TV series called Evangelion. This is a series whose popularity rose so vastly due to the fact it is one of the only if not the only fictional medium that explores human interaction in a way that is so remarkably complex, yet incrediblty well done, that is simply has to be seen at least once in a persons lifetime. Without going into much detail on the story, I will at least give a brief rundown.
The story of Evangelion is a science fiction work in the post-apocalyptic genre. Despite the series having lots of action sequences and not looking much like a series thats truely about people, the entire series makes human interaction the main stage. The characters in the story get thrown into incredible situations that force them to constantly choose between right and wrong, they have abandonment issues with their own parents, and the main character in particular is forced into situations out of his own will in which he is forced to deal with these interactions.
One of the most important traits of our main character that is explored in the series is called the “hedgehog’s dillema”, which essentially describes how he struggles to get close with other individuals or else he will hurt them with their “sharp spines” or in this case, their own personal traumas. This idea was first described by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. As the series begins and progresses, more characters are introduced of both genders as well as similar and different age groups.
The main character is then not only forced to deal with these new characters on a one-to-one basis, but also live and share the same rooms together. Later on in the show, the complexity of the scenarios in which the characters are placed in become more in depth but also very recognizeable to us as people going about our daily lives. We see first hand how our main character deals with these new relationships, and the widely different life styles that all the characters he lives with have.
In a way, this is very similar to my own experience of getting my first job, I learned and dealt with many different individuals than myself and worked with a large variety of different individuals all of which were much different than myself. Conclusion In conclusion, I feel like I have a strong understanding of human interaction and relations. By gaining experience working several jobs both full time and part time, I have gained a lot of personal skills and development to communicate with others and understand people better as a whole.
In my fictional example, learned a lot about people, as the series explores human relationships very well as the director himself wanted people to understand the value of human interaction. I only touched briefly on my fictional example as I could easily write several pages about the series in greater detail, but I’m hoping I got my point across. I’m sure just reading the title of the series makes it sound complex enough, as most individuals struggle to say the title of the TV series correctly due to its complexity as a whole.
