Is Life Becoming Shallow?
There are many things I learnt in my time away last year.
One of the main benefits of spending an extended period traversing different cultures, countries and continents is not, as some may expect, noting the differences and variety our race has to offer, but in the similarities and consistencies.
Undoubtedly, globalisation in the digital age is in full force. Fashion and tradition vary much more in smaller towns and villages (ponchos in Peru, tatami mats in Japan, Wellington boots in the UK) than in cities, where major brands reign supreme from Athens to Tokyo, Paris to Rio. People are influenced by more similar forces, like celebrity and social media, than we ever have been before. Additionally, the internet offers unparalleled access to items previously unattainable and almost every tourist site was surrounded by hawkers offering knock-off Prada purses and LV bags.
The more upmarket areas of cities have the same feel to them no matter where you are: yoga/pilates studios, organic cafes, wine bars and boutique homeware shops. There is a growing, and seemingly unstoppable, homogeneity sweeping across the world - regardless of culture, creed or even economic status.
Though this has innumerable benefits, such as at-home comforts in foreign lands and reputable places to eat and drink, there is a clear downside too. To me, this borderless commercialisation and commodification had a very cheap feel to it. I don’t mean in terms of price, I mean in terms of essence.
Where people used to have to make things well enough for people to want to buy, now any label can be slapped on something churned out in seconds at a factory before selling it for meagre profits. Most of the ‘local cultural items’ on sale in Turkey or Brazil had in fact been made in China, with the artisans who had actually made their things locally slowly pushed out, unable to compete with the cheap prices.
It follows a trend that I have noticed generally in our modern world - we now have to look harder for things that used to be commonplace.
Where commodities such as clothes, coffee, fancy food and artefacts used to actually be quite hard for people to get their hands on, many cultures revolved their very existence around tradition, spirituality, family and purpose.
Of course, there is the danger of falling in the Golden Age Fallacy with such thinking; ignoring our access to medicine, travel and many other wonderful things in our current lives. But this is focusing not on what we have gained, but what our gains may have cost.
I believe there is something ineffable about our need for connection to not only each other, but ideas bigger than ourselves. For some this has been gods, nations, leaders or ideals. These days, it is hard to find these ideas. We have never been more secular, many feel no love for our nation-states (especially when we have such perspicacity over their actions), leaders are replaced with pop stars and how we want to live doesn’t enter most educational discourse.
The result is we are left without anything of depth to believe in. We can believe in ourselves and our sense of purpose, but without careful pruning this can lead to tricky thorns of egotism and narcism, an existence which pricks anyone who gets to close to us in an already spiky world.
It requires us to look deeper; to search hard for gems which used to be commonplace. Many of us are no longer born into any real sense of tradition or practicing culture, which is perhaps why ideas such as Yoga, shamanic healing, Buddhism and others have become so popular in many developed nations. This may also be why sporting teams play such an important cultural role; they allow us to connect to a group via an idea bigger than ourselves which transcends class and creed.
So, what do we do?
We take the time to investigate and choose.
The positive spin on the above is we are no longer forced into traditions or customs that may not resonate with us, or perhaps downright oppress. We can use research and personal experience to dictate our views of the world, not mandated expectation.
This is what I did; moving away from a semi-Catholic upbringing, through a stage of atheism before finding philosophy and subsequently yoga. Now, I use the ideas of Greek mystics, Indian sages, Chinese wanderers and Japanese monks to inform how I live in modern Melbourne. There is a privilege in this choice, one that many people (especially females) across the world do not have the luxury of.
For each of us it will be a different combination, but we must choose. If we don’t, we are forced to confront the difficulties of life with nothing but our own ideas and frailties, like trying to hold your hand up in the face of a gale and hoping it will protect you.
As humans, we have too much innate depth to operate purely on the surface level and, when the world is like a shrinking tide become more and more shallow, we must go out in the deep looking for the treasure ourselves.
