ing the city and walking the world
As I walked through New York last week, I saw 800 people.
I looked at people I was walking by.
Not one of the 800 people I saw was conventionally as attractive as a Hollywood star. Few looked anything like the pictures I saw on billboards that I passed. Most of them wouldn’t fit in a commercial. Maybe 40 of them went to a prestigious college and maybe 10 were competitive athletes. They were all kinder, wiser and more concerned about important issues than typical TV characters.
Some were older, while others were younger. Some carried canes or wore hearing aids. Others wore glasses. Some were in wheelchairs. Some of them could run faster than me, and they all knew things that I had never thought of.
Imagine zooming out to pass 800 people randomly selected from all over the world. You will see more about what it is like to live on this planet. Fewer than 300 of the 800 have been on an aircraft. The average intelligence of the half is higher than that of the other half. 200 can speak some English. 50 of them earn only a few dollars per day. Four to five of them are in servitude. Few have the same impact on climate change as you or I. More than 600 are concerned about the state of the world.
Scaled consumer marketing, for a long period of time, has created status roles, where none previously existed, and amplified class and division as a means to create insufficiency, and generate sales.
What we see in the media, or on a pile of resumes, is not the real world.
All of us are weird. That’s okay.
