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Family structures have always been confusing to me. There is what’s considered to be a normal family, with slight variations; then there are families that are perfectly capable of functioning and being happy, welcoming environments, but are perceived as less valuable or weaker versions of what a family should be.

The idea of a normal family consisting of a father, mother, sister, and brother has been perpetuated throughout the entertainment industry as well as others. Any variation from this cookie cutter model is considered an abnormal family structure, and is often used when portraying a character or advertising a product that is considered to be abnormal in some way. Single parent households are considered unbalanced, while families with many children are chaotic and disorderly. Television shows and books run the gambit with parents who’ve abandoned their children, or who have adopted strange kids from difficult circumstances, and there is always something that ends horribly wrong, or the writers try too hard to make it seem like these “broken” families are just as happy or appear just as normal as, well, a normal family would.

These stories call into question the definition of a family. If you look up the definition online, there are a dozen different definitions for what exactly a family should be defined as. However the words do not do the concept any justice. A family is idealized as a group of people you feel close to, feel safe with, or belong to. It’s about the people you surround yourself with, both by blood and by heart. Take for example the idea of an extended family, or a family that expands or contracts due to divorce or death. All of the people involved may not share the same genetics, but they would tell you they are (or were) part of the same family.

A family is another construct of humanity trying to control the society that they’ve built. The idea pigeonholes people into believing that there is only one combination of people that they are allowed to call family, and have forced the creation of a multitude of words to attempt to describe the people involved with someone’s life. Legal disputes try to keep the definitions carefully cultivated, but there is no way to do so based on the profound ways humans connect with each other and form social units.

There is no such thing as a “normal” family; if you look at your own, I’m sure you’d agree. Family are the people that love and care about you, even during the times when you feel you don’t need it or don’t deserve it. Family extends beyond biology, and the connections humans make with each other will never be able to be simplified into a single set of words.

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One of the things that is the most entertaining and confusing to me is the idea humanity has created that one person can “win” something. I am not attempting to say that all people should get a prize for just breathing, as that is definitely not how I feel. What I’m referring to is more along the lines of how everyone thinks there should always be a prize at the end, but for getting through something. Rewards must be given, or something must be taken away for failing to complete something. This is not how the world was designed to function.

In the wilderness, animals are trained through games and similar tasks how to function as an adult in their respective environments. Thy are rewarded with food or general survival skills that may someday save their lives, but never a toy or a trophy. Humans historically follow similar patterns of behavior; we have games that teach us how to interact with others to further the social dynamic of our society, we have games that teach us what shapes and colors the adults use so we can have the tools necessary to navigate their world as we are gradually initiated into it. However human beings are rewarded with objects that we have created to catch our own attention, and desire above all else. This has created a societal paradox: children are rewarded for becoming adults, but adults are expected to reward children for functioning normally. The compromise we came up with was to simply reward adults as well, so they would continue to strive for things the way they did as a child; only they could not be won over with a meaningless toy. This desire fueled the construction of the society we currently live in, but it has also caused people to expect to be rewarded to the point that no reward is sufficient at this point.

This in essence is driving our society into the ground, as the motivation of humans is being burned out due to the lack of shiny things at the end of the race. Rewards are handed out because they participate, and the rational is it boosts morale and causes people to feel pride in what they’re doing, making them want to do it better and more efficiently. All it’s really doing, though, is using the mechanism that conditions animals to tend toward one set of actions over another to create a society of adults who believe that they should get a trophy for surviving instead of just the benefit of remaining alive.

There is no good way to solve this problem, as it is becoming ingrained into the general populous to the point that the entire community has come to agree that things should be done this way, as it’s the only thing they know. This will perpetuate the problem until people start seeking new rewards that get so extreme that they start injuring the population as a whole; and by then it may be too late to go back. Being alive should not win you a prize, because winning is a construct of humanity’s need to have a purpose to survive. Survival is the prize, whether it’s shiny or not.

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I have been working a lot with classification recently in a microbiology class. This has brought to my attention the absolute mess that is the scientific classification system. When you’re in high school, the way to name organisms is explained as a simple process where the genus and species are used to determine the lineage of the organism. What they do not reveal is the fact that the system used to classify these organisms is not actually a system at all, but mostly guesswork.

To determine the relation of one organism to another, the most common method today is genetic comparison. There are also phenotypic comparisons, which relate certain characteristics of one animal to another. The problem with these is that there is so much variation even within a single population that essentially every organism could be considered its own species if looked at under the right microscope. While this may be a slight exaggeration, it emphasizes the point that most of these names are given out of humanity’s need to name things, not the actual relation of one organism to another.

These systems are also by no means proven to be correct. Even the organisms that have been called one thing for decades or centuries have been proven to belong somewhere else on the tree of life several years down the road. This highlights the shortcomings of biology’s ability to classify and categorize living things, as there is simply no way to be sure that two things belong in the same group unless you place them there – making the entire system subjective to whichever humans came up with it and carry out its procedures. There is no guarantee that these names are accurate at all, and yet they are the only method we have of connecting the dots between all of the life that coexists on this planet.

It is also a fallacy that all the organisms on this planet have been classified. New animals are discovered all over the planet, in peoples’ backyards as well as deep ocean dwellers or remote island insects. Microorganisms especially are always developing new strains or variations of themselves, making the amount of names needed to identify each of these as infinite as the potential for them to be labeled incorrectly.