Photo by d3l

What we wear on the outside, what we decorate our bodies with, inevitably causes assumptions to be made by others about who we are. What started with a necessity to protect ourselves from the elements has evolved into an art form. From what I have been able to observe around me, I have separated the way people view clothes into two main categories. Aesthetic wearers and niche wearers.

Aesthetic wearers are those who choose the clothes they wear based on what they find visually appealing. They are for the most part not limited by any particular style. They wear anything and everything that they think will look good on them. This may sometimes be inhibited due to social acceptability but anything allowable by law is fair game. This group includes those who wear clothes more for functionality than for appearance, because to them, function is beauty.

Niche wearers, as I call them, are those who decide what to wear based on what group of people they choose to associate themselves with. They choose clothes based on what characteristics they want others to perceive in them. The Emo look is an excellent example. Here, members of the group choose to wear similar clothing to show to the rest of the world their membership. The niche wearers are not limited to those who want to show group membership. This includes people who want status, style, sexiness, or any quality that they are consciously choosing to exemplify. The popped collar wearer is a prime example. Never has there been such a blatant indicator to the world that this person is purposely seeking to be viewed as “cool.” The niche wearers will consistently choose to follow their desire for certain qualities over comfort, quality, sometimes even price.

The way I have constructed it is a little too simplistic. In reality, no one is perfectly one or the other. Everyone has a different balance of the two. This is because we already have preconceptions about what looks good, and they are based on seeing others. So the aesthetic wearer cannot be completely original, and the niche wearer will not choose to wear something completely ugly. But for the most part, elements of both these ideologies are visible in the style choices of the people around us. The actual possibilities in appearance are not exactly infinite in reality, so it is very much possible to see a niche wearer and aesthetic wearer in the same exact outfit, but what differs is the motivation. I believe everything a person puts forth to others can indicate something of their personality, and clothes are no exception. So next time you find yourself in a social situation, see if being an aesthetic or niche wearer has any bearing on the way a person interacts with you. I would be very interested to learn of your experience.

Photo by Noel Zia Lee

Is the value of a cute and familiar animal greater than that of an unfamiliar animal?  I’m defining familiar in terms of closeness to humans.  Of course this varies across cultures as well.  Eating a dog or cat would seem unthinkable to most people in the United States, but it is commonplace in Asia.  But this bias toward animals that we think are cute or animals we have become accustomed to living among seems inconsistent.  The value of a dog versus the value of a cow does not change with the human opinion.  Both are four-legged mammals and neither have any discernible mental advantages over the other.  So our decision to eat one and adopt the other comes down to how friendly these animals are to us.

We could adopt a subjective view of the world and claim that whatever we perceive as value is value, making the friendliness of the dog its higher value.  But in this view, I would also become acceptable to differentiate among humans like this.  I would be able to kill anyone that I believed had lesser value to me.  Obviously this is not the prevalent philosophy.  The people that eat cows are for the most part, people that think humans have value and certain animals have value.  Outside of the subjective view, we have no logical basis for differentiating among different animals.  Without a logical basis, it is just inconsistency in its most obvious form.

How can a person be against eating dogs, but eat cows?  Most consumers of beef or chicken would not want to cause the death of a cow or chicken, yet they eat them.  It seems that we are just choosing to ignore what’s not in front of us.  It’s more convenient to make these differentiations than to face our inconsistency.  A person who chooses to eat animals should be perfectly willing to kill animals.  Some might be willing to accept the killing but want someone else to do it, even this is fine because they are accepting responsibility.  But to eat meat without wanting animals to die is wrong.  A person who chooses to eat meat and kill the animals that gave rise to the meat must also accept the killing of other animals.  If I choose to kill and eat stray dogs, the beef eater should not tell me that I am wrong.  It would just be a matter of taste.

The existence of an objective moral truth is arguable, so I cannot claim whether it is right to kill animals or not, but either belief should be practiced with complete consistency.  The meat eater should be willing to accept the death of every kind of animal.  The animal rights activist should not cause the death of any animal.  To choose among animals corrupts whatever we believe and we end up with an inconsistent and faulty moral code.

Photo by Procsilas

It seems an especially difficult thing to love everyone, as some people might.  In my understanding of love, there would be no desire to change the thing that you love if you truly loved for what it was.  So if one were to love everyone, the problem I’m about to describe wouldn’t apply.  The problem is that people are so complex that it is impossible to find a person that could be deemed perfect in the eyes of anyone.  There are so many different sides to a person, that even someone we deeply respected or admired might have a side to them that would be unappealing to us.

As I see it, there are initially three possible attitudes we could adopt in our view of others.  We could choose to like everyone, dislike everyone, or be indifferent to them.  Each of these must be applied to everyone, because choosing to like or dislike only certain people would be to suggest that there is some level of perfection, or some level of inexcusable faults.  Also, if we were to choose only certain people, then everyone would choose different sets of people.  Even the person we might most despise would be liked by someone.  In this case we don’t approach any conclusive decision about the population because our own liking or disliking would be meaningless.

The problem I see with loving everybody is that if we really were to love everybody and accept people as they are, then we would not be right in trying to change them.  This creates a conflict because everyone holds certain values to be important, if we loved everyone, we would love even the people that embodied the opposite of our values.  If we are to accept everyone, then why hold our own values to be important at all?  If we are accepting of everything and do not seek to change anyone, why speak of such values at all?  Of course this is under the assumption I have made that loving entails unconditional acceptance.  This may not be true for others’ view of love.

So I decide to choose between like, dislike, and indifference.  This also became quite perplexing as I would waver between the three of these over the course of the last couple of years, depending on different experiences with people.  I still feel there must be some way to resolve this inconsistency.  I don’t think we can be indifferent completely because nobody is born indifferent.  People are driven to indifference through negative experience, and just the fact that this experience affects us defeats the purpose of indifference.  We are left with dislike and like.  Every person I know has sides that I like and sides that I dislike, so it’s hard to write anyone off to completely dislike or choose anyone to completely like.  My solution has become to like or dislike based on the sides within each person.  This way, there is someone to like in everyone, and someone to dislike.  This view also leaves room for change.  I can still hold my values and desire change based on those values in the sides that I dislike.  Right now, this is the best balance I can strike between complete liking, which I feel excuses too much, or complete dislike, which is too harsh.

This view is very much something I thought of recently, so I would be very interested to hear your own solutions or opinions so I can improve this idea or see the faults in it.

It’s really surprising how much you can notice around you when you come out of yourself.  If you can leave the thoughts about your own life and day-to-day chores, your mind is able to soak up and give new meaning to so many things that you might have missed before.

I’ve been visiting India almost every summer since moving to the US in 1998, but when I was there this summer, I noticed a lot of things that I had missed before.  It was probably a result of the changes my mind has been undergoing in the last couple of years.

The thing that struck me the most was the vast cultural differences that exist between the social classes in India.  Now I might have known this at some level before, but I probably only knew it as a dry fact in my head and not something real or observable.  In America, a person earning $30,000 a year and a person earning $300,000 live similar lives.  Of course the latter has a lot more luxury, but they are exposed to the same TV shows, they both drive cars, enjoy central A/C, and if they were to meet on the street, they could probably carry on a conversation with each other pretty well.

Now consider this image, on a busy street in downtown Bangalore, there is a new nightclub that’s just opened and there’s a massive crowd of young Indians waiting outside, busy on their cell phones, adjusting their designer clothes, and sporting the latest looks from GQ.  Directly across the street, there’s a building under construction that has just shut down for the night.  Sitting at the 1^st floor windows, are some of the workers that have just finished.  These are people that make about $40 a month for their labor. They’re sitting and looking at the crowd assembled outside the nightclub.  These workers don’t know why the club goers are dressed so weird, they’re trying to understand why everyone is trying to argue with the doorman to get in.  This is quite different from the small roadside huts that they will go on to have a few drinks at.  The alcohol the workers drink come in plastic packets, they don’t speak English, they don’t know about the economy.  The two groups of people that are 15 meters apart from each other, from the same city in the same country, wouldn’t be able to carry on any type of conversation whatsoever.

It’s hard to describe the image, especially since I can’t convey the feeling I got when I realized this difference that exists.  It’s hard for people in America or other developed nations to understand I suppose.  If you have spent a lot of time traveling, I’m sure you’ve noticed this, and if you’re planning on traveling, keep en eye open for this, it really is quite startling when you first realize it.