I quit watching news for almost two months; finally managed to disable the Google News widget and all notifications on my phone related to News. What a freedom! This habit showed improvements in my mood, made me happy, more energetic, and so much of positivity in myself than before. Sometimes I have a nagging fear of missing out — surely something important must have been going on in the World I don’t hear about? But for my mental health I found it better not to follow any News. Today somehow my eyes caught a headline – while I was browsing online- and briefly read the article as it was about a bank I used to work for. Reading this article triggered an interesting point of view which I am sharing you all now.
Travelling in multiple continents and countries bring you memories and new experiences; you start to see the World not just from a little cube but from a wide-angle. When you live in a wealthy country and the government is not letting you to starve or even to be homeless because of the benefit system, you have different problems than the rest of the World. You start complaining about the weather, you cannot find the perfect plot to build your new house, the PS4 games you have are getting boring, the 15th expensive wrist watch no longer makes you happy, the Amazon delivery delayed a day, or a bank has a technical problem and you cannot do your shopping for a whole day.
‘An absolute nightmare’ was the title of the article caught my eyes. As I lived in England for 10 years, I can fully understand how frustrating it could be not able to pay by card in a grocery store. I have been there, worked at banks where for a 15-minute outage I stressed out and had to report to managers why my maintenance work took longer than expected. I was also a heavy consumer; was shopping online and at retail shops often. At that time, I thought the worst can happen is that a bank has an outage for a whole day. This opinion changed after visiting Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico and seeing the poor.
In these countries poverty made many people more helpless in their day-to-day lifestyle. Many poor are either engaged in low-paying jobs or are without jobs. Some are too ill or disabled to work and others are living alone (aged, widowed), who cannot earn enough to support themselves and their children. Seeing 5 years old children on streets walking between cars (on busy roads) selling fruits to survive, seeing mothers with children (on dirty pavements) living in worse conditions than many dogs, countless homeless and prostitutes in Sao Paulo, being without electricity and tap water for 24 hours in Mexico changed what I consider bad.
After such experiences you no longer think, the biggest problem is not being able to pay by cards for one day. There are millions of children die in hunger or from contaminated water in many parts of the World. Life depends on money in these places, if you have no money, you will not be treated by doctors, you will not get lifesaving medicines, no government to support you, you are all ALONE. This is scary and today I imagined again what these people may can feel daily when they fight for their daily survivals. “Absolute nightmare” is lying on a street ill, with nothing to eat and with no future. In our comfortable life – in the well developed countries-, we often forget how lucky we are! We have everything given to have an excellent life, the only thing is missing, being more grateful for what we have here and have more patience with each other and with the technology that makes our life super easy!
I would recommend to all residents of the wealthy countries to make some trips to poorer countries and see for example the clean tap water (we flush the toilet with daily), is a huge lack and people die by thirst at other parts of the World. Maybe this would make “us” more grateful and remind us, we are lucky to live in our country.
For now, this blog post serves as a reminder, the problem you may face with, maybe at another continent is a fortune, a gift of God. Remember this again when you feel, the worst nightmare you have, is not being able to go for shopping for a day.
