It's all relative
Avocado, with a banana for scale
- The Internet
I love the Internet. It’s where I work. it’s where I create. It’s where I get entertained. It’s where I communicate. Saying that it has helped define my life for the last twenty years is an understatement.
A year or so ago, I stumbled on yet another weird meme, where everything was compared to a banana, to give an idea of scale. I found the idea silly, but at the same time illuminating.
I tend to believe everything is relative. It makes reflecting on where we come from, when expressing a point of view, essential. Incidentally, changing perspective from times to times helps with understanding people around us better.
But… back to the almighty yellow curved fruit.
Picture a banana next to a mundane avocado, which price is incidentally, once smashed, a well known unit of real estate affordability in Australia.
In my westerner’s mind, then, it’s pretty clear the banana should be somewhat twice as long as the avocado.
But I’m in Brazil… The picture above shows what the norm is here. Does this picture show a small banana, or a large avocado?
As it happens, it’s both.
The avocados I’ve been eating here are about four times as big as what I got used to in France, Australia, Canada… On top of that, it’s the opposite story with bananas. They are rather small. And not very curved.
That picture made me think of what I take for granted, what I consider eternal truths (hint: not very many things), my own cognitive bias…
All of that from an avocado and a banana? Yessir.
I come from France.
Until I turned thirty, I had lived all but one incredible, astounding, life-changing year as an Erasmus student in Sweden, in the Southern half of France. My home country is a beautiful place. Its cultural, scientific and obviously culinary significance (the Baguette just got added to the UNESCO World Heritage) are considerable, particularly when related to its size and population.
I am shaped by these twenty-nine years.
I love me some good cheese, wine and, yes, baguette.
It’s par for the course that when I’m unhappy about something at work, I’ll go on strike. While smoking a cigarette.
Even better, I’ll find another French person to complain with and then we go on strike. Together.
Joke aside, I’ve lived abroad for the last ten years, to the point that I don’t really consider I’m living abroad anymore. I just don’t live in France.
This experience, or more likely these experiences, have dramatically changed my perspective on a multitude of things.
I loved travelling by train in France. Sure, sometimes the bathrooms were dirty. Some times, the train would be a bit late. Some times, it would not even show up at all (see comment about strikes above). But overall, that was what I considered to be a normal travelling-by-train experience.
Until I moved abroad.
Try going anywhere by train in Australia, US or Canada.
You mostly can’t.
Some cities have a decent trans-urban network, but most don’t have proper train connections between major hubs. These trips are made by car, bus or plane (usually a function of distance, population density and traveler wealth, see the price of a Rocky Mountaineer train ticket). All of a sudden, my vision of normal train transportation had to change. My mental model simply didn’t apply anymore.
This experience, incidentally, helped me appreciate the French train network quality and convenience even more, because I had been exposed to a wildly different approach to the same problem: mass transportation.
Ultimately, this post is not about train systems around the world. It’s about the need to think about where we come from, both on a geographical and ideological standpoint, whenever we look critically at a situation.
I’m sure wanderlust has made me a better human.
And maybe, just maybe, if everyone spent a few months in immersion in a foreign country at some point in their life, this world I love so much would be an ever-so-slightly better place.