Home » Posts tagged 'culture'

Tag Archives: culture

Fluff Your Canada Goose

Posted on by | Leave a comment
Photo attributed to Thenix

Photo attributed to Thenix

I was walking past a dry-cleaner store yesterday and I pass by this store everyday to get to my yoga studio. They have a sign outside their door now – Fluff Your Canada Goose Here. I saw that sign about 10 times before it started provoking some thought. I have a goose-down jacket for the winter, and a goose-down quilt to sleep with. They are both really old, and haven’t been washed since I started using them – about 3 years. Suddenly, this person is offering me a chance to fluff them. Ah, salvation!

Then I thought about it for a second or two, and I realized this is the reason why the habit of consumerism is so freaking hard to get rid of. Because they are inside our heads. It is hard to get rid of them, when they are speaking to you from inside of you. A week ago, I didn’t even know you could fluff the goose-down products in your home, and now I have a long list of items I want to fluff. By the way, aren’t feathers already fluffy? Why do they need to be fluffed? Mysteries that only a drycleaner would know.

According to a study that they did on children, pre-schoolers are already affected by advertising and have brands that they are loyal to and recognize. No wonder by the time we are in our twenties, the consumerism culture is so ingrained in us, that even the thought of repairing something is abhorrent. Why would you sow a little tear in this item when you could purchase a whole new piece?

In addition, there are thousands of new products that are being invented all the time – that are just ready to help you with any ‘problem’ that you might have. Even problems that you didn’t realize you had a week ago, or a few months ago. You cannot walk on a metropolitan street without being marauded by a hundred signs offering everything from weight loss to psychics to lasers on your pens. With the hundreds of products on instant order from China, at the tip of your fingers, why would it even matter if you do not have hundreds of dollars to spare? Most of these items are just $3 or less.

The point, of course, is reducing this need to purchase without need. You need food, you need to buy food. You need water, heat, a home, some clothes, and shoes, and that is all. The rest is all peripheral. You have to analyze your needs list carefully and notice if certain wants have creeped into the needs section and are camouflaging themselves in your eyes.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to BrownVagabonder and connect with me on Twitter.

Itching to go back to work

Posted on by | 2 Comments
Photo attributed to Thenix

Photo attributed to Thenix

After the joys of Christmas and New Year, I just feel that I’m happy to be going back to a normal set schedule at work. It is funny to me when I realized the sigh of internal relief that I felt once the crazy holidays were done, and I was back to the first normal week of January. I have been waiting for this. Why is that? After all, we wait for holidays when we are adults. We want to be done with work and we wait impatiently for Friday. We are waiting to be done with work, to retire and to be able to sit on the beach for the rest of our lives.

Over the past few weeks, with conversations and thoughts, I have realized I am the kind of person who needs to work. Who needs full-time useful work in order to feel sane. Who needs to be occupied. Who basically cannot play the role of a trophy wife, not that, I would have that opportunity in the near future. I need to work. Which is kind of a horrible thought when you first think about it. Sad and horrible.

If I take off for sabbatical, I will not be able to do it as a staycation. If I lose my job, it will be a certainty, I’ll find something to do in relation to work, maybe a server position or something else to fill time and space and bring in some cash. Unless I’m travelling. If I’m travelling, I will be able to do a year without work, because of the movement aspect of it. My anxious, busy mind is occupied by movement. I am enthralled by the different. Different culture, people, city, hotel room. All of it occupies me. It ensures I do not start dwelling or thinking.

An anxious mind is the place for the devil, not an idle mind. A mind like mine left too long without anything to do starts creating drama that always leads to disaster. Imagination is the key to the world, but left unchecked, it creates horror stories.

I wanted to share the horrible realization that I have had about work and my need for it. Let me know if you are the same.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to BrownVagabonder and connect with me on Twitter.

A distracted culture

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Photo attributed to Thenix

Have you ever noticed those drivers on the highway, who are merrily driving in your lane, but suddenly realize that they missed their exit, and swerve into a passing exit, to the detriment and honking of several other drivers? Do you ever wonder about them? Most people do not drive very different routes from day to day. Most people I know drive the same route in the morning to work and the same route at night back home. They do not vary it much, except when there is a detour on the street due to an accident or construction.

Why are these people who are supposedly driving the same routes over and over again, surprised by an exit that they need to take? I wondered about that for a while. I would think about that while I did my own unexciting commute every morning and night. I knew which exit to take because I take that exit every day at the same spot around almost the same time every day. It is a life of routine in an otherwise crazy world.

I do not all of a sudden forget that I need to be in the right lane in order to take my exit to Finch Avenue, or whatever it might be. I realized after some thinking that it is because people are distracted. They are distracted by the stories that are roaming around in their own petty little heads. They are distracted by their to-do lists, by work, by school, by their families’ demands, by their children, by their bosses, by the millions of things that you have to do in order to survive in the metropolitan cities of the world.

You are not thinking about the drive that you are on, because you are wondering if you switched off the coffee-maker in the morning, or if you locked the door. You are wondering if your child is doing drugs and that is the reason he/she is getting so hard to handle. You are wondering if your boss is planning to fire you and that is why he keeps on holding these random interviews in his office. You are wondering if your boyfriend/husband/girlfriend/wife is cheating on you or still loves you. And another million things on top. No wonder anxiety rates or depression rates are through the roof. How could they not be?

One of the main things that help me when I’m feeling overwhelmed or anxious is of course, to take a step back, but also to stop multi-tasking. We are a world of multi-taskers, and it is ruining the quality of work that we do, but also resulting in additional anxiety. So when you drive, you should only drive. When you eat, you only eat. When you type an email, you only type an email. And so on.

Try it and let me know how it goes.

What is long-term really?

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Photo attributed to flickr user Ed Yourdon

On reading my post about the iPhone 5 and its adapter, Thenix said something that kind of surprised me, as I had never thought about it. He said, that he realized that I have a different definition of long-term than a lot of people around us. The iPhone has had the same adapter for 10 years or more now, which to him, or in general, would definitely be very long term. But, when I was writing the iPhone blog post, I was thinking more in terms of tens of years, or even hundreds of years. The amount of time it would take the adapters to dissolve into nothingness. The amount of time they will stay in our environment polluting our rivers and lands, and ruining our environment.

He told me about this organization that deals with long-term thinking, Long Now. I started reading about it and I realized there are others who think the same as me, and I was fascinated by their 10,000 clock.

The thing that Thenix explained to me that they were finding a challenge was the fact that culture, and the concept of time could/would be very different in 10,000 years. They needed to ensure the clock would last and would be interpreted as such in the future.

You can read more about them and their mission on their website, but one part of their mission struck me as highly important. The mission to ‘help make long-term thinking more common.’

We live in an age of instant gratification, and I find this emphasis on long-term thinking, really long-term, refreshing. Long-term isn’t just a hundred or two hundred years. It is definitely not until next election, or next year, or the next vacation. It isn’t until you are done school or your children are done school. It is far, far longer than that. It is until the end of civilization as we know it and the beginning of a new one, or more. It is until human beings are extinct, or Homo Sapiens as we know it, turn into something different.

It never ends. It might even be until the Earth is consumed by the Sun in its sad demise, a billion years from now, when the Sun gets so hot, all the water vapor on the Earth dries out.

What is long-term to you?

Balance – a lifelong journey

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Why is there such guilt associated in my head with liking someone? Of putting myself over my family. Am I just not important enough? What is this thing in the Asian culture of always putting the family over yourself, your needs and desires. Every time I like someone, I am in the honeymoon phase with them, I want to spend as much time as possible with them, I do. And then a massive dollop of guilt is just ladled over everything I do. I am unable to really, truly enjoy myself in his company because I am boggled by all of this guilt. Why am I feeling guilty, I wonder. Why am I not allowed to feel pleasure, to feel good? Does everyone on this planet have to be miserable together? Aren’t we allowed to be happy? Of course, it doesn’t make any sense.

I want balance in my life as does anyone else on this big, beautiful planet. We are all striving for balance. I find that it is truly hard to find a balance. I am either really skewed towards myself and my goals, or towards spending time with family or towards spending time with friends, or towards spending time with someone I’m dating. Those are the four areas of my life I struggle to balance out. With a limited amount of time on my hands, after a long day at work, I have a few choices I have to make. I can either de-stress from the day by going to a nice yoga class, after which I am too exhausted to make conversation or do anything, besides eat a hurried meal and go sleep. Or I can go home and have some conversation and maybe even have a meal before everyone hurries off into their own complicated, filled lives. Or I can spend some time with my friends or with the boy.

The options are limited, as time is limited. Balance is key. I do everything I can to ensure my health is up-to-date. But then I have to prioritize after that.

How do you prioritize the various important things in your life?