much as concrete facts shape our lives, the impacts of culture is too often overlooked. our world, if you look closer and think deeper, is the true sculptor of what we call life.
we're grateful for science, biology that saved our lives, technology that ease existence to an unfathomable level; however, for the sake of the economy, we cut through patches of fabric, our culture in its very endless sleep.
before digging deeper, let's all define what culture is. is it the characteristics of a particular group of people? too complex. way of life of a group of people, in a paticular area? close enough. culture is basically, what people around us are doing, what is considered right, what to say when you first met local people and not getting people pissed of so much that you end up being expulsed. our culture, undoubtedly, influence our thoughts and actions. many people spend their whole lives fitting in to what the society considered formal.
in the past, I spent too much of the time to go and find the perfect culture, though knowing that it would not exist. Japan, the country of whom is good at almost everything, who defined what limitations really mean, end up with high stress level, karoshi, and significantly low birth rate since it's expensive to live alone, let alone sparing your time to find love and have kids. USA, so many outstanding figures, yet so many problems, school shootings, mental health problems, you name it. New Zealand, or other happy countries as they were ranked, somehow managed to be in the list of the countries with highest sucide rate in the world. what define happiness after all, why are people upset? I don't know, the only thing I know is there is no easy way, no one-size-fits-all solution to this complex problem.
seven billion people is a lot; however, when you break it down, we're all people, and we want pretty much the same thing - a good job, a good relationship, basically a good life. however, we focus too much on the outside culture, that we forgot to cultivate the culture within us. it takes me a long time to realize that there is no perfect culture, and even if such thing exists, it would not seize the needs and opinions of everyone.
so, at the end of the day, what do we do?
we create a culture, rituals of ourselves.
5/6/2021.
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