DailyJim: Cultural change, climate change, and how we are creatures of our environment

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym this is the episode for wednesday april 24th 2024 just a little bit after the day i wanted to talk about culture change climate change and how we are creatures of our environment so it has been raining a lot here in kenya and a lot more than i think it's supposed to be. I think it's normally the rainy season, but it has been dumping. I think yesterday it rained for, it was almost five or six hours straight, and a pretty steady rain too.

Being from Michigan, I find that somewhat absurd. I've never seen so much rain at one time, and I don't know how common that is around the world, actually. And I noticed how it impacted how people were driving. You know, if roads are flooded, then people can't drive very well. If roads are flooded, then people can't live in their houses very well. Some neighborhoods got flooded.

And if we are experiencing climate change that will create more rain in this particular part of the world, then how do we update the infrastructure to manage that? How do we update the sewage system? How do we update runoff and all these things to keep up with the climate change? And if we don't, what impact does it have on humanity? And not just humanity in general, but humanity very specifically in our behaviors. So how does that impact the emotions that we have when we're driving? How does it impact the emotions that we have when we're interacting with each other? How does it impact the emotions that we have when we think about the future? I think we have this.

Notion, I think many of us believe this notion that culture is pretty static, that it doesn't change very much. And I think that is so far from the truth. I think culture is very dynamic. It changes very often with the environments that we're in. So many of us don't want to talk about it, but we went through a pandemic with COVID. COVID's still around. It's not impacting people nearly as much as it did, but that was a huge pandemic that we went through and impacted a lot of people. So the environment or the climate, if you want, not just necessarily the climate in terms of the weather, but the emotional climate, the environment that we were in where many of us couldn't leave our homes, many of us either lost relatives, lost family members, lost jobs, lost hope, so many different things, or conversely, got really strong and got really rich and, found new hope and started relationships or some relationships ended. It was just such a turbulent time that brought so much change based on the environment. And I look at what's going on right now and I think there are a lot of effects from that. And then you think about it, if someone is just watching the TV or going on social media and seeing posts about Israel and Gaza and seeing posts about Ukraine and Russia and seeing posts about Sudan or posts about Ethiopia or posts about abortion being banned in the US or all these different things. This can bring up so much emotion and can overwhelm us and I think.

It's almost akin to more floods in a way. The metaphor that comes to my mind is that with climate change, there might be a lot more flooding of water around the world. And I think with the internet and especially with COVID and how things can move so quickly, people, viruses, information, how it can move so quickly across the world nowadays days that we are starting to become flooded with emotions as well. And that a lot of us will get flooded with emotions and we'll just tune out. We say, ah, let's just give up. I've noticed that with a lot of my friends, that a lot of people are just giving up. It seems like a lot of people are just closing off. And I can feel it in myself too, of, ah, whatever, let's just let them be. This apathy setting in, this feeling of being fried.

And I am worried about it. I'm worried that I think sometimes we have the belief that culture and humanity opens up. We become more liberal or we become more open and loving over time. But I don't think it's the case. I think humanity goes in different directions. I was talking with a friend yesterday about, I think, before, I don't know if it was World War II or World War I, but there weren't passports in Europe. And then afterwards, it's, ah, we need passports. So that borders became stronger. People erected more walls. People shut other people out. We became more exclusive, more reclusive in a way, and not inclusive, not open to bringing people together, more divided, less united. So I think...

Not only will the geographical climate change impact us, but I think just the climate change in general, the emotional climate change that is happening can impact us. And I worry a little bit that we may be getting flooded with so many emotions that many of us, not only flooded with the emotions, but also flooded with the belief that other people People don't care about us and flooded, so flooded with people telling us that life is not worth living and nobody cares about us and everyone's abandoning us and nobody's paying attention to us and that we will become overwhelmed with those ideas and forget that most people are trying their best. Most of us don't know what we're doing, but we're trying our best for ourselves, but also so much for other people. a lot of times we care so much about other people and yeah, I'm just rambling a little bit but just this whole idea about.

The environment really impacts human behavior whether we want to admit it or not, and how can we pay more attention to that and see which way our behavior is going and maybe try to take the behavior in a different way alright, thanks y'all, have a good night, bye.