What’s more exotic, a mango or a turnip? What’s sweeter, ice cream or an apple? More culturally different, someone in a different country or generation?
What’s more exotic, a mango or a turnip?
In New York City, and most of the U.S., you can buy mangoes at many stores. Turnips are harder to find.
People say they travel to experience new, exotic things. But they don’t see that there are new things in their back yards.
What’s sweeter, ice cream or an apple?
Ice cream has more sugar than apples and for most Americans, who are about 80% overweight or obese, tastes better. Apples probably don’t taste that sweet to them.
But after stopping eating ice cream long enough for your saturated taste buds to recover, apples become incredibly sweet. Ice cream becomes inedibly sweet. I almost can’t eat a whole apple these days because they taste too sweet. I haven’t eaten ice cream since a few spoons last Thanksgiving, which was probably my first time in years. It was pleasurable, but had a taste of “I’ll regret this later” that I’ve learned to honor.
Who is more culturally different, someone in a different country or generation?
People say they travel to see other cultures, but overwhelmingly go to places where they get on the internet, interact with people back home while there, meet other people also on the internet, eat at restaurants designed for travelers like the ones at home for travelers, all leading to distant places becoming more similar.
Meanwhile, we put our grandparents in homes and don’t interact with them. Yet they grew up in worlds as different than ours than a geographically different place. They may have grown up during the depression, prohibition, World War 2, and so on. I’ve loved the friendship that I’ve developed with Frances Hesselbein, for example, which came, in part, from my staying home so much lately.
Value, meaning, and purpose
I value adventure, diversity, nature, and what people get from traveling.
My not traveling, combined with eating fresh foods, has led to no shortage of exoticness, more sweetness, more learning about people different than me.
Anyone can get the value of traveling without polluting so much. It would be interesting to live in a world with a population below the planet’s carrying capacity, with solar-powered airplanes, and without the garbage every tourist destination gets covered with, but we don’t.
Why is it that when I talk about avoiding polluting by flying, people only see the benefits of traveling, never the pollution and greenhouse gases, and they never see the beauty and glory of the world immediately around them?
What’s so repulsive about where they are that they have to leave so much?
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