What are the characteristics of being human? What does it feel like to experience life? In the inaugural session of Human, we'll explore the joy, the misery, and the wonder that comes from living.

As humans we also experience emotions -- joy, heartache, pride, and suffering. We celebrate, create community, and rely on each other for survival. We invent things, build companies, create governments, and manufacture sciences, religions, and histories. We are wrought with biases idiosyncrasies, and contradictions. Some of the things we experience are not unlike how humans experienced their lives thousands of years ago and some aspects of life are totally unrecognizable across centuries and millennia.

Life today has unique wonderments and challenges. What can we learn from the past and from each other about how to appreciate all of it?

Join Tom for an open discussion group as we lay the groundwork for exploring aspects of what it means to be human.

Zeitgeist is German term for "spirit of the times". What does it mean to be a human in our time right now? What unique opportunities does it present? What challenges does it pose?

Toward the end of Greg Brooks TEDx Talk called "What does it mean to be human?" he states the following:

“Whenever we reflect on our experience, and then express our experience in some tangible way, we are being fully human. We are never more fully human than when we link our minds together to link our reflections and our expressions together with others so that people both now and in the future can take advantage of those and enjoy life and grow and develop as humans.”

In this way, culture, from religion to fashion and from history to social media is creating the continuous genetic code of the species.

Join Tom as he leads a group discussion on the challenges of differentiating yourself from the time in which you live. What difficulty does this pose when trying to understand who you are as distinct from the influences of the people and the world around you?