“Let reason be the guide in the world of passions.”
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
Have you ever heard of psychic numbing? It means that when people are exposed to disasters, deaths, or suffering over and over, their emotional response gets weaker, so they feel less shocked, less empathetic, or less motivated to react. In disaster psychology, this is described as habituation: the brain adapts to repeated threats so it can keep functioning. In more basic words, it is the numbing of the brain to go through the day without shutting down.
Do you relate to this? Do you ever see videos or news about war, drought, or starvation in the world and feel helpless? And stuck in this pattern, do you ever feel numb, lacking reaction to ongoing disasters? I know I do, and the numbness is not because of my ignorance; the source of it is knowledge. The endless input of knowledge in my brain.
However, sadly, in a world where knowledge is a droplet in the endless oceans, our generation has its mind put to stay on the land, where we can obsess over mind-numbing, fast trends; labubus, Stanley cups, 6-7 trends, and girlypops…
We became a society where becoming blind, numb to disasters became the norm. We made knowledge easily accessible, and we filled the web with trends passing faster than light speed. We normalised the expression of self through looks, called it passion, and fed the fashion industry. We could not stand the slowness of it and made everything fast; yet it was not enough, we made it faster. Now, we are deep in a hole, yet no one is aware that’s the bed they will lie in. We are digging ourselves a grave and sewing our eyes shut; now we can only wait like corpses for the next disaster, which we will pretend not to see.
And you know what all of this adds up to? A generation complimenting or criticising each other based on their looks, which are both created using the same resources, creating the same amount of waste, causing the same terror that will bring an end. Either to the Earth as we know it, or to our ignorance. I will leave the commentary up to you.
So, my dear reader, let’s make reason be the guidor of us in the world of passions. Let us not be blind; let us learn, and today, let us learn about the water use in the fast fashion industry. So, next time someone tells you, “I love your shirt”, you can confidently say, “Thank you! It took 2,700 liters of water to make this cotton t-shirt. I love how I have the luxury to consume enough drinking water for one person for 900 days with just one purchase!”
Let’s delve more into the issue in the following blog and learn more about the complex web of wasteful water use!
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