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How to Be a Better Human

ALOK is microdosing creativity and rejecting norms

How to Be a Better Human

TED

Self-improvement, Education

4.21.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

ALOK doesn’t quite get the term multihyphenate – but how else to describe the internationally acclaimed author, poet, comedian, and public speaker? From exploring belonging and the human condition, to fighting to degender the fashion and beauty industries, ALOK is tapping into their creativity constantly. Today, they share their approach to the creative process, how art has helped them accept the beauty and pain of life, why poetry and comedy need each other and so much more! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts

Transcript

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0:00.0

Ted Audio Collective.

0:02.0

Audio Collective.

0:04.0

You're listening to How to Bea Better Human.

0:09.0

I'm your host Chris Duffy. Beauty is one of those words that I think many

0:15.4

of us feel like we know when we see it but also feel like doesn't apply to ourselves.

0:20.0

Or let me not speak for you. That's definitely how I feel. We've all heard the phrase

0:24.4

beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that's not really true, right? Beauty is

0:29.6

often uncomfortably standardized and limited in who it applies to. It's thin bodies, it's light clear skin,

0:36.0

it's fashionable clothes that double as a display of wealth. But today's guest, Aloque does not buy that. They don't buy that one bit.

0:46.0

Aloque is on a mission to redefine what we think of as beautiful, to help us all to accept ourselves fully and completely,

0:49.5

and to break down the rigid societally constructed rules around gender.

0:54.0

Beauty is less about what we look like and it's more about what we feel like.

0:58.1

Beauty for me is about presence being able to be located here and now, not what anxiety makes me do, which is

1:07.6

dwell in the future and not what depression makes me do, which is stagnate in the past. Beauty is fundamentally about being myself, not even

1:16.0

just looking like myself, being myself, which means that beauty shifts over time.

1:21.1

What I found to be beautiful five years ago is not what I find to be beautiful now.

1:26.2

And that means that we have to make standard that there is no beauty standard, that actually

1:30.3

each person is their own complex universe and offers and templates their own

1:35.4

form of beauty.

1:39.3

We're going to talk much more with a loc in just a moment, but first a quick break.

1:43.0

Don't go anywhere. Hey, it's Adam Grant.

1:53.7

Host of the TED Podcast, work life.

...

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