I like to think everyone has their own world, their ecosystem. Their ideas, thoughts, and inner dialogue portrayed as vibrant flora and the livelihood which grazes upon it. These conceptual spheres of mental life can vary so much from person to person and hinge on the climate, altitude, and culture they nurture theirs’ in. That means someone’s world can be the most animated rainforest while another’s can resemble the driest of desert storms.
I also like to think that most people like to keep their planet pretty, well-maintained and overall happy to reside in. To do that, it’s nothing more straightforward than three things: sunlight, water, and nutritious soil. Life is also simple in a sort of way: as long as you keep your fundamentals intact (physical, mental health, and financial well-being), you’re well-rounded and maybe even attractive to others because of how good you are at being so great at the simplest things.
The problem happens when you invite people into your mental habitat. It is easy to water your green plants on a daily basis; it is not easy to maintain and control the water quality if many people cross or walk by your river every day. People litter, people waste, people pollute. These are outside factors we cannot dictate and manage directly. That is why zoos and parks have opening hours, that is why we have nature reserves free of human and outsider influence.
There has been so much talk on herd immunity now that we’re impatiently waiting for doctors to jab us with a medical needle (twice, in fact). However, that is not the herd immunity I want to write about. Sorry to disappoint you if you were looking to read on something else. On my Medium profile, we only talk about our inner feelings!
The phrase “live in your own bubble” is most often negatively implicating you as arrogant and stubborn as a person. Yet, the nice ecosystem concept I narrated above is exactly just that: living in your own world! Everyone hosts a planetary individuality, whether it be a tiny sphere in the infinite galaxy or a unique ecosystem in a planet or a social bubble among humans. We accept certain things more easily than others and we reject certain ideas with less haste than some.
Social bubbles aren’t necessarily evil, even with phrases such as ‘living in your own world’ or ‘stuck in your head’ get thrown around with sarcasm and the occasional malicious intent. Social bubbles are a way humans live. It is a manner which we communicate how we thrive while at the same time is a source of balance. Because we are all in our own peculiar ecosystem, there’s no potential element of surprise that could catch us off-guard. It is a stability mechanism. Sometimes, we invite familiars over to our world to visit and celebrate and they are likely to do the same for us in return. Still, we invite others at our relative comfortable pace.
Social bubbles are connoted as stereotypically undesirable and a lot of stereotypes still hold true to them until today. The most dangerous and toxic forms of social bubbles are those that are unaware and immune. Ones that do not know the extent of the toll some other bubbles have on theirs and ones that are immune to external factors or both… These are the most potent forms of human egotism, the ones where people are oblivious to intense industry work being carried out in their home, the amount of lumber being cut down, the deaths of countless innocent creatures from doing so.
The worse part is that social bubbles have never worked in isolation but operates on updates from other social bubbles. Social bubbles are inherently social. These means dangerous social bubbles tend to be together and they are stronger when they are together too. Once the collective bubble becomes impenetrable, it has attained herd immunity, resistant to any outside world factors. It is the most dangerous type of herd immunity.
Racism
Racist folk live in a sheltered social bubble, one of the most potent kinds. Many a time it is shaped and cultivated from a young age in the background without them knowing. They feel secure knowing they are surrounded by people who act and look like them. When they are not around people who they are comfortable with, they act out of their element and may reserve their true feelings. That makes it hard to gauge and see how their ecosystems are like because they only present one window for you to view their world, the window they want you to see from.
A few weeks ago, I went to have lunch with a couple of people. We went to a place called the Chicken Rice Shop which was halal (permissible for Muslims to eat at ). I think it is worth pointing out a few things before I tell the story: 1) this happened in Malaysia, a South East Asia country which has Malay as its main population but is still very diverse in race, 2) shops that sell chicken rice are renown for being Chinese-owned which means a lot of them are not halal certified.
We were waiting for the food to come when one of us started looking around and seeing the lunch jam coming to the restaurant. He noticed the kind of people that were sitting around us and looking at the menus. He turned to us and asked:
“Why are there so many Malays here?”
I was kind of appalled from hearing that. I thought it was a very insensitive question. It is rude to assume that all Muslims are Malay based on the way they dress. He also feels as if he was the odd one out because of how he was ‘outnumbered’ and crowded by a specific race, by a race which main more than 60% of the population of our country! And also the way he asks is as if he’s gatekeeping: wherever he goes he should not be surrounded by too many people who don’t look like him to the extent he feels uncomfortable. It is as if they were foreign to him which is very worrisome to know.
Small-Town Mentality
My most recent experience with toxic bubbles were those related to a kind of small-town mentality, a form of thinking that comes from people who live with a certain type of population and a certain culture, characterized of being respectively very small and extremely uninclusive. Hence, ‘small-town’ mentality.
The easiest way to show what is small-town mentality and how it works is the most cited example. A person who was raised from a small town feels insecure and discriminated against whenever they try to wear unconventional clothes (unconventional by their hometown’s standard, not general consensus). But when they try to wear clothes they think they look great in while they’re in a metropolitan or a big city, they feel confident and not stared at!
It’s very dangerous to play with people who host these mindsets. Not all small-town people are toxic people. However, toxic people are able to really thrive and expand their craft in smaller communities. In a small town, those who are toxic can force their presence on others easily. Their influences latch on and grow quickly.
Toxic people also tend to group or band together. I have seen this personally in my hometown. Narcissists and other toxic people also generally are the biggest contributors to the rumor mill. They love to harness the rumor mills power to cast doubt on the mental health and other qualities of individuals. This is largely done by the narcissist in a tone of “being concerned” about that person.
It partly explains why people who from small towns arrive in big cities experience culture shock but in reality, the only one in shock is you. This scenario is different if we switch the person to be from a rural area instead, where internet access is limited and urbanization is weak and tremendously slow. There are small towns which keep expanding but never grow, these are the most worrisome.
Bipartisan
I have learned to never take the word ‘bipartisan’ or ‘nonpartisan’ literally whenever anyone describes their political belief to be so. It is tremendously hard to take an objective stance on anything these days. It is even harder to maintain a consistent take and perspective over several issues just to have it line up with a political party’s ideology. You are not a party, you are a human. You are allowed to feel differently on different issues.
So whenever some establishment or some person says they are neutral or mid, I wonder what goes on in that world of theirs. Because in everyone’s head, their concept of what it means to be ‘impartial’ will vary from time to time and person to person. Maybe it means being a mediator of things or maybe it could simply mean doing something completely different than any of the parties involved would have done.
Bipartisanship is more valued by voters than politicians because of how party-politics operate. However, voters who are the most knowledgeable and ‘debate the most’ in group chats are the most attached to parties. Reinforced by activists and partisan media, these voters expect their representatives to toe the party line, not embrace bipartisanship. That is why claiming or wanting to be bipartisan makes very little sense to me but it does in their bubble.
The worst part of all this is that I am privy to all this. I have an ecosystem so I too live in a bubble, my bubble. Sure, my bubble looks cute and nice to me but is it to others? Should it matter how it looks to others? I am vulnerable to these tropes and many others I have not seen or am made aware of. My bubble updates regularly but it is always from the same sources. I worry that I need to get over myself even without necessarily evaluating the need to do it the first place.
As I walked past the riverbank this evening, I saw beer cans floating past me and I instantly recalled the time I let a few of my pals in to have a couple of drinks. There was no real stench but I swore I could smell beer and I’m not drunk enough to not bother. Maybe I should keep to myself for a while. As much as there is a lot the outside world to offer, it is just as exhausting to venture through them as it is exciting.
I have flipped the sign over. My world is closed for now, no visitors, no strangers, just me. Let me tend to my garden and spin a nice jazz record for the time being. When I’m ready, I will reconnect and update my world, open it to the new migration like how birds do. In the meantime, I write to vent.
