Come As You Are
In our century, convenience comes with the push of a button, the addition of water, the automation of a robotic call centre. While clearing the clutter and cobwebs from the crevices and corners from your place, you might be stuck wondering where you fit into all of it.
DSM-IV Categorisation for Facebook Social Anxiety Syndrome (pretend, of course.)
Status changes at least five times a day. Games and applications to the excess that the PHP script is broken. Copious wall postings, usually of inane conversation. Affiliation with numerous groups, syndicates and fan pages. Trolling, flaming and blasting are your favourite hobbies. Your photo gallery is immensely populated, to the extent that you have been asked politely to reduce its content. Disastrous sense of social isolation, segregation and/or perpetual self-comparison against invisible metric of what your friends are doing, who they are purporting to be and what you’re missing out on.
6,834,052,227 billion people are now present in our world. 4,057,913+ hectares of forest is felled every year. 16,228,904 tonnes of CO2 have already been released into the atmosphere. 9,716,799,700 kWh of electricity used this year so far.
With numbers this large, you can’t help but feel a little insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As a subordinate at your job, a number in a sprawling society and a struggling soldier of your own ambitions, it’s hard not to feel a bit squashed. But isolated from the whole? That’s where we’re wrong. We are global citizens, and through globalisation, we’ve achieved the means to branch out and embrace a kind of human reconiliation that we’ve never known before.
An academic member of the University who has presided for some 20 years, returned from overseas recently with the widest and cheekiest grin I’ve seen on anybody for a long time. She looked around and laughed and said to me, “You’ve got to see the bigger picture. Here, you’ll only see things through the tiniest lens.” I didn’t know whether I should feel offended or overjoyed at her sentiment.
Then I thought about how nice it would be to travel and be immersed in an experience outside of the comfort zone. That is, until I found myself helping some backpackers, some tourists and interstate travellers find their way around the Sydney metropolis. You come to realise that where you are can be perceived as just as exotic as where they hail from.
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