The Research Project.

Quite a while ago, I asked several women about their fears or concerns. I was originally going to use this info if I needed to give a talk. Seeing as to how I'm a wandering church member, I don't know when that should be. Mostly I wanted to center on a couple of simple questions.
1) What do you Fear or worry about?
2) Do you think this is more a Biological concern or need, or Spiritual?
3) If you could change any 1 thing, what would it be?
Now, I was given quite a bit of flak on the questions. Overall, I wanted to see how many of these fears concerns, would be completely selfish, and how many are focused on others. The same is especially true about the 3rd question. It took me a while to get a sampling of 100 people, but this is what I came down with.
Out of 100 people, 35 were LDS. The others were unaffiliated with the major religion in the valley. Out of those polled, 70 were Women. Thirty of those were LDS. Out of the 30 men that were polled, 10 were LDS.
When asked about the first question, 15 of those (all women) expressed concerns about being alone or not being loved. 5 of the responses had to deal with Death or a fear of getting old. 5 of those responded with answers of being a bad parent. 27 of those responses dealt with failure or feelings of inadequacy. 18 had phobia fears of animals (spiders, snakes, sharks, etc). 17 of those polled (one a male), feared instances of rape. 8 of those polled were concerned with losing their job or lifestyle. 3 of those polled were concerned about incarcerated either in a mental intuition or jail. The other 2 responses were thrown out because they were pretty much incoherent babble.
The responses to the 2nd question surprised me, almost all of them (2/3rds) were admittedly Biological concerns. Even to the fear of dying, or being alone 1/2 of the people admitted that it was their biology and not spirituality that was driving it.
The responses to the 3rd question were as follows:
- 6 x Would change/want a worth while relationships
- 6 x Helping Children (ie Social Work, Big brothers/big sisters, etc)
- 9 x Loss of loved ones or the closeness of their family
- 6 x Would like to change Human Nature or Humanity.
- 5 x change their level of Intelligence or Mental Capacity
- 7 x would change their life span or the time they have on this earth.
- 7 x would like to change their families relationship with religious organizations.
- 7 x would like to change their self image.
- 10 x would not change anything or couldn't decide.
- 5 x would like to change Communication within Society.
- 5 x would change the perception of how others see them.
- 7 x would like to change their profession.
- 5 x would like to change their outlook on things.
- 5 x would change their health concerns or alleviate health problems.
- 9 x would like to be more social.

Now, out of all of those motives, I could only find 19 people who in effect are choosing something that they would change that would benefit others. The rest are those that choose something that only affects themselves. Yes, the questions are simplistic. That's the way it's supposed to be designed. I was also surprised how many people said they "couldn't decide anything". This is all just food for thought. We should be more concerned about how, what, and why we do the things to others that we do, and much less about our own needs and wants. The other piece of the puzzle is acceptance. Many of these concerns or fears have to deal with problems that they have no control over. Whether it be your health, your family members, or your own future. Many of those things you can't even control, so why worry about them? To tell the truth, most of them are pretty trivial by nature.
I was amazed at how many LDS people worried about their families relationship to their own religion. That's an aspect of humanity that I just do not understand. Most religions of the world preach that there is an afterlife. As long as someone is a good person, we'll typically be a good situation, so why does it matter. To automatically think that every family member has to think or do the same things that we do, makes for some pretty boring lives. The only thing I can think of relates to my father. My father is always proclaiming how much that I am "like him". When the truth of the matter, is that we are nothing alike. When something occurs that isn't remotely the same thing he would do, he gets upset, judgmental, and has an irrational anger that occurs in him. The only thing that occurs to me is this incessant human need to leave a little replica of ourselves for the world to continue on with. When, all it takes is to realize that this world is a big and complex place. There is no reason that we should be compelled to have copies of ourselves left for the next generation. Those kind of compulsions are just genetic throw backs. There are almost close to 6 billion human beings. The survivability of our species is almost assured in many cases. Many people just need to get out of their own human programming and just deal with the facts of life.