I can be bothered to write my essay

I can be bothered to write my essay

Best Compare and Contrast Essay Topics. Students love to write compare and contrast essays because they give them enough space to showcase their creativity. It’s also easier if you have to distinguish between two objects or people, rather than only looking at a single item. However, a compare and contrast essay is not like any other Jun 17,  · When my editor asked if I would write a Father’s Day essay, I didn’t know what I wanted to say. If that happened, my job would be to write the letter. It hadn’t bothered me until now when to write a “ character essay explaining why you want to be a physician assistant," at first you think, "okay, no problem." but when you actually sit down and write a pa personal statement including all the reasons why you think you are perfect for physician assistant school, it ends up turning into a jumbled mess. you've started working on your personal statement but have no idea if

Best Compare and Contrast Essay Topics for Students and Professionals

There are no atheists in foxholes, they say. My favorite uncle was, to all who knew him, a decidedly nonreligious man, never setting foot in a church except to bury his mother and refusing the visit of a minister in his last days. Yet the Haitian woman who tended to him as he struggled with his final breaths claims he spoke to God the night he died. The proportion of religious Nones in the U. population has grown dramatically, but much of that growth is driven by the young: only 9 percent of those over 65 are unaffiliated, compared to 35 percent of those under age 30, and we see similar proportions for atheists and agnostics.

Many people assume that facing death without religion renders life pointless and unbearable, that only exceptionally strong and stoic individuals can face the void that is death without a religious framework.

The study of Nones has focused mostly on the young, and studies of the aged have tended to ignore atheists. Secularity is i can be bothered to write my essay even among the old, and yet few have bothered to ask elderly secularists how they face death without religion. How do atheists, agnostics, and other seculars find meaning at the end of life?

How do they make sense of mortality without religion? I have spent the last two years exploring these questions, sifting through hundreds of studies and interviewing individuals in nursing homes, senior centers, and in their homes.

This article reports on some of what I have learned. When I reviewed the literature, it seemed at first that the foxhole theory was right. A substantial body of research suggests that religion helps people cope with dying. If a person is ill, dying may entail physical pain and disability. Even in the best of circumstances, we may find ourselves unable to engage in basic physical i can be bothered to write my essay we used to take for granted, or facing the loss of mental acuity.

And for most older people, the final years bring the loss of partners, family members, and friends who would otherwise support them at this time. Religion can provide a framing for why we are in pain or why we had to lose somebody we love—for example, if suffering is viewed as redemptive or part of a divine plan, i can be bothered to write my essay.

Religion also answers questions about what happens after death, whether through complex and varied conceptions of reincarnation in Buddhism and Hinduism, or through comforting beliefs that we will see loved ones again in heaven, as in some Christian traditions.

There are increased rates of depression and suicidal behavior among elderly people. Reading scripture or meditating is something an individual can do, even with physical disability. And when a loved one dies, rituals like sitting Shiva or preparing for a funeral mass offer structured, familiar activities for loved ones to do, i can be bothered to write my essay.

But saying that religion helps people find meaning in the face of death does not prove that meaning is absent without religion. Recent reviews of such studies show that they focus almost entirely on religious people, usually comparing more devout people to those who are less devout. Only rarely do they study individuals who are committed seculars, i. Peter Wilkinson and Peter Coleman found that both atheism and religion can be a source of meaning for older people, and it is the strength of conviction, rather than being religious or nonreligious, that enables effective coping.

What we do know is that finding meaning is an interpretative act. Human beings make meaning by telling stories about our lives. Even when people are telling stories that are similar in content, they use linguistic, rhetorical, structural devices to create different sets of meaning. There are broader social narratives that shape individual storytelling, what Ann Swidler has called the cultural toolkit.

I like to conceptualize meaning making as a kind of mapmaking enterprise. The stories we tell are the way we connect the dots and orient ourselves.

Without a constellation map to life, events can feel random, and we can feel lost, frightened, i can be bothered to write my essay, and confused, especially when we are entering new territory. But when i can be bothered to write my essay have a map, we have a path to follow; we have agency and power.

In my current research I am seeking to understand how this works for nonreligious people. Are there generic stories that secular adults use to make meaning, especially at the end of life? If so, how do they rework these stories to create meaning from their personal experience? So the study, begun in late and currently in its final phases, is based on personal interviews with elderly seculars.

The two main criteria for inclusion are age 70 and over, though I include younger individuals with terminal illness and nonreligious identification.

Participants were recruited in nursing homes and senior centers, with the assistance of the AARP and various secularist organizations. To date, a total of 97 interviews have been conducted in various locations across the United States. Although participants were not randomly selected and may or may not be representative of the nonreligious elderly population as a whole, this is a large sample for a qualitative study and reflects important demographic patterns.

It is gender balanced and includes 12 black respondents surveys show that only 4 to 7 percent of African Americans identify as nonreligious. Nonreligion comes in many varieties e. These conversations are conducted in private homes and in institutional settings, depending on the preferences of the subjects, and they range in length from 45 minutes to 2.

All interviews are transcribed for coding and analysis. The study of so-called Nones poses unique challenges that are readily apparent as I begin to review the data I collected. The first and most obvious is theoretical: we are looking at a population that is defined in i can be bothered to write my essay of what they lack—religion—and yet there is no consensus on what religion is.

The models of religion employed in the social sciences are largely based on Christian constructs. It has long troubled me that Pew, Gallup, and other big survey organizations use measures such as belief in God, i can be bothered to write my essay, attendance at services, and denominational membership or identification with particular traditions, and then apply these cross-culturally to places like China or Japan, despite evidence that this is a poor fit.

I have proposed elsewhere 16 that we distinguish American Nones into at least four categories: Unaffiliated Believers have conventional, usually Christian or Jewish worldviews, but reject organized religion; Philosophical Secularists have replaced religion with a distinct nonreligious worldview such as atheism, Humanism, Free Thought; Spiritual Seekers claim no religion because they create their own worldviews from more than one spiritual tradition; and last, i can be bothered to write my essay, those who are indifferent to any kind of religious, spiritual, or secular worldview.

This model has apparently been helpful to subsequent researchers, 17 and yet my current work on elderly Nones is raising new questions. Consider Jack, an i can be bothered to write my essay retired engineer I interviewed at his home in the Northeast.

Thus, he and his wife regularly host a secular Passover at their house to pass on the family tradition, but Jack interprets the Exodus story as a metaphor for his hope that freedom will eventually triumph over oppression. Perhaps we need another category for people like Jack, such as culturally religious, or existentially secular, or both. A second challenge in researching the nonreligious is methodological: how do you access them?

Religious folk are easily located through the organizations they affiliate with. Not so with the Nones. Even among self-identified atheists, the vast majority do not affiliate with atheist organizations. They were old enough to have personal memories of the civil rights i can be bothered to write my essay, which had close ties to the black church.

Turning their back on the church can feel like betrayal, and they are unsure of their place in organized secularism.

Take Andre, a year-old physician from Atlanta. Raised Baptist, he left church in his 20s to join the Nation of Islam and then a decade later came to reject religion altogether. White atheists can feel isolated as well.

I interviewed Fred, a year-old military veteran, at a nursing home in Massachusetts. A high school dropout, he joined the army and after his release held a series of low-paying jobs in construction and long-distance driving. He fell into drinking and was homeless for more than a year before a social worker found him a place in a Catholic nursing home.

I learned that recruiting respondents for this kind of study means finding ways to make them feel safe. When I posted flyers at that nursing home seeking volunteers for study of nonreligious people, I got zero responses even though their records show more than a third of residents stated no religious preference.

So I collaborated with the staff there to personally invite those individuals they thought might fit my criteria. I also spent weeks walking about and knocking on doors, introducing myself and telling people about my project which was how I found Fred. This was a rather time-intensive recruitment effort, but it yielded many more interviews. I mentioned earlier that surveys show significantly lower rates of nonreligiousness among blacks and older people.

Now I wonder about those numbers. As I listened to individuals tell their stories, I was struck by their eagerness to tell them. I remember sitting by the bed of a year-old woman who was nearly blind and had both her legs amputated due to diabetes. We had talked for about 45 minutes and had gotten to the part where I planned to inquire about her thoughts on death.

She was one of my first interviews, so I hesitated, reminding her that she did not have to answer if she did not want to. I am 91 and not in good shape, so I spend a lot of time thinking about death.

There is surely some selection bias at work here: respondents to an end-of-life study probably feel comfortable discussing their thoughts on the matter, i can be bothered to write my essay. But it is also true that meaning making is particularly salient as we approach the end of life. In other words, meaning making at this stage of life is both backward and forward looking, mapping past and future. The 97 stories I collected confirm some of the conventional assumptions about nonreligious people.

Most do not believe in an afterlife, at least not in the sense that a soul or spirit or some conscious aspect of the self survives the death of our brain. And most do not think the universe, or human life, has an inherent purpose. But, contrary to conventional assumptions, that does not lead to despair or anomie.

Instead, I found that secular elders construct their own meaning-making narratives from secular rather than religious sources, and there are distinct patterns of secular meaning making that can be compared to religious ones. There are certain story types that I encountered again and again, suggesting that these meaning maps are not idiosyncratic but represent a kind of ideal type of narrative nonreligious individuals use. These narratives function similarly to religious narratives by providing coherence ordering the past and control action steps for the future.

Like religious narratives, they articulate the meaning of human existence to something bigger than ourselves, and they suggest a moral dimension. By far the most common narrative framework was rooted in the scientific understanding that we are all part of nature more than half of the respondents used some variation of it.

Previous research suggests that scientists are more likely than the general population to be nonreligious, 21 so it was not unexpected that many of my respondents were trained in the sciences, as engineers, chemists, i can be bothered to write my essay, and physicians. More surprising was how science functioned as a meaning-making narrative. We often think of science as cold and hard and value neutral. Although there were many variations, the basic arc of this narrative is that humans are part of nature; we have a place in evolution and a role in the ecosystem, and our role continues to develop and change.

What happens to us has material causes that can be explained by science. And though there is no inherent purpose in the universe, we can create meaning for ourselves. Life is reciprocal and interdependent; our actions ripple out into all aspects of nature. Death is part of life and should remind us of our kinship to other animals.

(Help!) I don't want to write my essay

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As you read your essay, remember the "The Princess and the Pea," the story of a princess so sensitive she was bothered by a single pea buried beneath the pile of mattresses she lay upon. As an editor, you want to be like the princess—highly alert to anything that seems slightly odd or "off" in your prose Like several of my respondents, she spoke of the butterfly effect (how a butterfly flapping its wings in Chicago can set in motion a chain of atmospheric events that cause a tornado in Tokyo). For her, this is at once a metaphor for the power of small changes and for the limits of our control over the world when to write a “ character essay explaining why you want to be a physician assistant," at first you think, "okay, no problem." but when you actually sit down and write a pa personal statement including all the reasons why you think you are perfect for physician assistant school, it ends up turning into a jumbled mess. you've started working on your personal statement but have no idea if