Yeah. It's mindblowing how we can all be communicating instantly across entire oceans like this with people we would never have been able to meet in any other period of history (or may never still meet irl now, but can still connect). Can criss-cross the globe in seconds and interact with billions of people (the ones with internet access anyway and if we share enough of a common language to make basic conversation, but even that will soon not be the barrier it once was with translation tools).
And yet I can still go months without replying to people I know and care about irl... 🤔 The first paradox of modern life.
As for past times though, I'm not quite sure I'd 100% agree there. Like, trekking through the wilderness, yes. The human population even a few thousand years ago was tiny, before it grew exponentially, especially since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern sanitation, penicillin, health care and better farming methods and all that.
So yes, who knows if maybe we pass more people in a single commute today than we might have crossed paths with in our entire lives once upon a time (brains also not wired for that so we're a bit overwhelmed now). But we should also remember that until recently humans mainly lived in small kinship groups of 50-200 individuals or something, so I think actually you would be getting a lot *more* daily face-to-face social contact than a lot of us do now, in our atomized world that is simultaneously hyperconnected but also completely disconnected from nature, our natural rhythm, and so much of what we used to have that was important. And remember also that that old-style contact would've been with people you know well or are even related to. The second paradox of modern life.
And then what's weird is that, with the arrival of the internet/web, mass communication, international flights and globalization (in just the globally interconnectedness sense; not the political one), one might've assumed that we'd usher in a new age of cooperation, understanding and cohesion. I mean, in a lot of ways we certainly have done that. But at the same time we seem to be more polarized than ever before, and despite "information" bombarding us like crazy and frying our brains in ways our bodies were never equipped to handle, we can still be totally uninformed or ignorant about a lot of the world and often less tolerant or more fearful of others than the other way round. The third paradox of modern life.
Bit strange, right?
Caption this Meme
