And here I was thinking I was just an increasingly cynical bastard, distilling other people's misery into an attempt to push people's buttons on a blog somewhere.
It's telling, though, that it's the coffee guys that make us rich fat protoplasm blobs in the West say "damn, that sucks", because we can still vaguely imagine what it would be like to stand in a windowless (but air-conditioned) cubicle and push a button all day long. But below a certain threshold of misery, people turn into freak shows and it all becomes just so many statistics. For us, $91 is the bar tab at the end of a modest night out, not the product of a year's backbreaking toil in a rice field; 6 cents is the cost of sending a single SMS, not our yearly budget for keeping in touch with friends and family. People are eaten alive by pigs only in Hannibal Lecter movies and cow poop is, like, totally gross.
And then you go for the first time to Bangkok, to Jakarta, to sub-Saharan Africa, to India, and you get the disquieting realization that all this shit is actually for real, and there are people in this world who are infinitely worse off than you and have no prospect of ever being able to do something about. What do you do then?
jani
Protoplasmic reply
And here I was thinking I was just an increasingly cynical bastard, distilling other people's misery into an attempt to push people's buttons on a blog somewhere.
It's telling, though, that it's the coffee guys that make us rich fat protoplasm blobs in the West say "damn, that sucks", because we can still vaguely imagine what it would be like to stand in a windowless (but air-conditioned) cubicle and push a button all day long. But below a certain threshold of misery, people turn into freak shows and it all becomes just so many statistics. For us, $91 is the bar tab at the end of a modest night out, not the product of a year's backbreaking toil in a rice field; 6 cents is the cost of sending a single SMS, not our yearly budget for keeping in touch with friends and family. People are eaten alive by pigs only in Hannibal Lecter movies and cow poop is, like, totally gross.
And then you go for the first time to Bangkok, to Jakarta, to sub-Saharan Africa, to India, and you get the disquieting realization that all this shit is actually for real, and there are people in this world who are infinitely worse off than you and have no prospect of ever being able to do something about. What do you do then?
I'm still trying to figure out the answer.