2020-08-30

【Aiden in English】

Uniqueness. Teachers preach to young children that everyone is unique in their own way. Diversity, they call it.

In truth, every person is slightly unique. Genetics and environmental factors say so. In today’s world, it’s never more important to be unique. That’s what my teachers tell me anyways.

It’s hilarious that being unique can also be the most common aspect of a person. Take a car assembly line. On each line, every individual worker provides drastically different services to the one beside him or her. One worker may wield a door to a frame; the next may screw in place the seats. In an isolated scenario, they are two completely unique bodies with completely diverse skills and completely contrasting jobs. 

        No one, however, sees them be unique. To society, they both are car manufacturers, nothing more nothing less. It’s a constant struggle to feel unique in today’s world. The United States population has ballooned up to 330 million as of Aug. 2020, and every aspect of the economy, internet, workplace, education, music, sports, you name it now appears inflated with … people.

The average human lifespan is around 80 years in North America. That’s around 2,522,880,000 seconds. If you lived in North America and wanted to meet every person in the continent (579 million), then on average you would only have 4.34 seconds per individual. In a passing day, anything of relative commonplace below 5 seconds is a blow-by, a minuscule event that won’t even lodge itself into your memory (if you disagree, ask yourself what the last YouTube advertisement you saw was about). In general, we won’t see 500 million folks in our lifetime, but there’s a couple hundred thousand we’ll likely interact with.

Studies show that an average person can remember around 5,000 faces. Among those, only a few hundred we’d consider as acquaintances, while a fraction of that can be categorized as friends or family. People’s minds are precious real-estate. For most, every “unique” person you see is thrown into the unimportant junk, never to be used again, because at some point, the “meeting new people” thing becomes a common event that no one cares to invest more time in. Take the high school student working at the ticket booth to a theater (if those still exist in 2020). I recognize him from my school, but I rarely see him. There’s no benefit to either of us to introduce ourselves to each other and chit-chat while a long line of people waiting for Frozen 2 tickets piles up behind us.

        99.9% of interactions will blow past us in our lifetimes without much thought. But certain figures inspire you to think about how gardening in concert with nature is essential to improving the health of our planet. 

【紅霞譯文】

與眾不同。老師向少年兒童灌輸每個人都有自己的獨特之處，由此衍生出多樣化。

實際上，人略有不同，遺傳作用及環境因素早有定論。在當今世界中，沒有什麼比獨特性更加重要，難怪老師們都這樣告誡我。

另把獨特性當作人之常見的東西倒是蠻有趣的。以汽車裝配為例，生產線上各個勞動對象均為下一道工序提供天差地別的服務：一個工人給門框鑲車門；隔壁的那位給座位擰螺絲。就個案而言，他倆無論在技能上還是在工種上都截然有異。

        然而，沒人認為他們舉世無雙。對社會而言，兩人都是汽車製造工，僅此而已。如今欲求標新立異需要做出不懈努力。截止到 2020 年八月為止，美國人口激增至三億三千萬，經濟、網絡、職場、教育、音樂、體育等各行各業隨着…人口爆炸而蓬勃發展。

北美人均壽命80年左右，約為廿五億兩千二百八十八萬秒。如果你在北美洲生活並想遇見每個人（五億七千九百萬），那麼需要平均每人四點三四秒。以往任何少於五秒不起眼的事情如同過眼煙雲，從不會引起重視（假如不信，就請捫心自問上次油管廣告你看到了啥）。一般說來，我們一生見不到5億人，能打上交道的充其量千把百位而已。

研究表明，常人只能記住大約五千張面孔，而熟知的不過幾百張，其中包括一小部朋友與家人。人的思想是寶貴財富。多數情況下，人的“特質”統統被當成無關緊要的垃圾棄而不用，因為在某種意義上，“結識新朋友”趨於常態，沒人肯花工夫去發掘獨一無二的東西。就拿在售票處打工賣戲票的高中生來說（假如2020年一切如常），我認出他是自己高中同學，但極少碰面，因此當身後排成長龍等待觀看《冰雪奇緣2》時，彼此不好再套近乎聊天。

人生中99.9％的互動都碰撞不出太多思想，但是某些看似忽略不計的個例卻能激勵大家去思考與自然和諧相融的園藝如何對改善地球健康至關重要。

Today in History(歷史上的今天):

2014: Labor Day Weekend Party(勞工節周末聚會)

Crosslink(相關博文):

11th Grade(高中三年級)