Monica Byrne’s Ted Talk Review

By carolinianweb on April 10, 2019 • ( 0 )

Alliana Avancena
Staff Writer

Monica Byrne begins her Ted Talk with a statement about how creation needs constraint. She represents a character within a hologram and she is 318 years old, talking about her life with her wife. The life she talks about focuses on the wonders of the visual world and how it can lead us to our greatest escape.

Byrne imagines rich worlds with a society that defies our racial, social and gender norms and stereotypes. In this performance, she plays as Pilar, transmitting a story of love and loss back to her audience from the future that is not as far-off as we might have imagined. Byrne mentions how there is science behind metaphors and how romance is a good illusion in this world. In this deep sentiment of passion, she talks about eternal life with her love. As a hopeless romantic, she realizes there is beauty in constraint, a schedule of keeping things together.

The visionary character feasts at descriptive language to tell the audience how her utopia would feel if it could ever be real. There are various comparisons to modern love in how the most treasured relationships that are kept sacred would lead humans to be greedy. Many would become obsessed with eternal life, and she gives ideas of people who may decide to create a new Earth for the purpose of their own desires.

In talking about death, she predicts more of the future, as she says, “the unknown is an abyss of our mind that we must break through to get to the other side.” Pilar hunts for solutions and compares this to topics of biochemistry in how collisions of great minds and people happen behind the faith and understanding of nature in the world.

In this spiritual approach, she feels that her love is overflowing, and she is inspired by the space that many masses take up, yet many are more meaningful than others. She mentions how she takes up no space but the space she is given. The power behind each defying message helps me to think about what a person may want to lead on with their lives.

Do you want to live passively or with compassion and drive? As the near future becomes the present, there is no room to look for the past. In her own mind she takes up space and we give the actress’ character a space in our mind to reflect upon what we need to do in our own lives. As college students, this Ted Talk speaks to our muse, to know what we want, yet to be realistic and knowledgeable that unexpected things may happen, but to address our capabilities to get through it.