The Luxury of Averageness

The United Nations estimates that about 689million people live in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty here is defined as living on less that $1.90 per day. This is calculated using income and people's ability to meet their basic needs. Like most numbers, the devil is in the details here.

A closer look at this 2020 Human development Reports published by the U.N. shows that over 1.3 Billion people live in multi-dimensional poverty. They, usually, have little or no access to potable water, nutritious food, steady electricity, quality education, basic healthcare and shelter. They are also prone to high rates of infant mortality. It's important to note that this lack of access to products that would meet their basic needs is not always because these products do not exist around them. They usually exist, the real issue is that people living in poverty do not have enough resources to afford their needs.

Of all the things poor people can't afford, I think the most expensive, and perhaps the one we need most, is what I like to call The Luxury Of Being Average. The Luxury Of Averageness, for lack of a better term. To put it simply, I think that for poor people to live long and happy-ish lives, and permanently escape poverty, we simply cannot afford to be average at anything we do in our lives.

I'm aware that a lot of people equate being exceptional to being rich and leaving poverty behind. The reality is that this is rarely the case for people born into poverty. Many studies have shown that hard work and generally being exceptional doesn't always translate to better life circumstances and outcomes. My experiences of being born, raised and growing up in Sub-Saharan Africa confirms this theory; I simply do not know any group of people who work harder than poor people.

My experience is that most poor people have to be exceptional in their everyday lives to survive. Thousands of us die avoidable deaths daily. If a minor disease doesn't kill us, our unbalanced diets, poor infrastructure, poor working and living conditions eventually do. We are always one not so random tragedy away from early death. 

As grime and alarmist as that may sound, it really isn't an exaggeration. It is our reality - one we must acknowledge before we can make any significant progress on our journey away from poverty. First step to solving any problem is acknowledging the problem, right? Right. This reality of ours is even more grime for those of who are citizens of so called 3rd world countries where welfare services are pretty much non-existent. There is a reason life expectancy rates are so low in these countries. 

Contrary to what some rich and privileged people believe, poor people do not enjoy being poor and we are always thinking of and scheming about ways to get out of poverty. It's the only thing we think about as much as we think about where our next meal will come from. Again, this is much more pronounced in 3rd world countries where the gap between the quality of rich people's lives and those of poor people is widest. It is infinitely more difficult to be born into poverty in 3rd world countries and somehow find your way out of it.

Being born into poverty is to always be the best at everything or risk death. It's winning every footrace to the stream so that you can get semi-clean water before others get there and muddy the river; it's a survival of the fittest against natural selection; its being top of every class because the only way you can get quality education is if you won a scholarship. Being born into poverty is risking your life by going to work during a pandemic because hunger would kill you faster than COVID-19 if you don't work and earn your literal daily bread.

Just like rich people, poor people would love a break from working and being exceptional at everything. The only difference is that our lives depend on our exceptionalism. We would love to flunk classes and get average grades. We would love to work average mid management jobs and earn average salaries without worrying about how to foot our bills if we or our dependants got sick. We would love to take educational gap years and travel the world to ''find our true selves and passions'' whatever that means and is. 

Poor people would love to live average and unremarkable lives in small towns, age quietly and die peacefully in our old age, yet retain our dignity even after death but these are luxuries we cant afford. We simply can't afford to be average.

Random Tattle and Waffle On Life and Possible Time Travel

One of the ways I imagine our reality is like an infinite loop that recreates itself infinitely, in infinite directions. like driving on a road that moves your destination further away from you, the closer you get to it. I imagine that this happens because time moves way faster than us humans and all our means of transportations.

For example, if humans could run a thousand meters in half a second, you could be tempted to say that that is time travel. You would be wrong. You would be wrong because if the distance doubles to two thousand meters, the time needed to run it would also double to a full second. I believe that as long as the time doubles with the distance, time remains faster than us and consequently, we can neither travel ahead of it nor go backwards in it.

Next you might wonder if ''pausing'' time would make any difference. You might ask if we could we travel back in time by pausing time and retracing our steps. As tempting as that sounds, I don't think it would qualify as time-travelling to the past because everyone else would be stuck where we paused them and we would be the only ones moving. That honestly looks more like being faster than the rest of the ''paused'' world and getting to the future before them. 

Ok, I admit that sounds like time-travelling into the future. Perhaps, time travel would only work for travelling to the future. We could maybe stop an accident by moving a kid out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. If the car has already hit the kid though and we retrace our steps and push the car back, the effect of the hit would still be felt by the kid because it has already happened. The only way to stop the kid from feeling the effects of the hit AFTER it has happened, seems to be to somehow, rewind time like '80s and '90s kids did cassette players. Staying with that analogy, we would then ''record'' new events over the old ones.

If this theory and logic follows, it would mean that every time one human goes back in time to change something that has already happened, and everyone pauses, they would create a new reality/dimension. This new reality/dimension would of course house their consciousness as it dies off in the old reality that was taped over. 

If all humans had the ability to do this, it is not far fetched to assume that all 7 billion people on earth would have at least one reality where their consciousness exists and rules. One reality which is their world. One reality where they are the protagonist and everybody else has a supporting role. we could posit further that these worlds, realities, dimensions, what ever you chose to call it, would have all started from one consciousness. 

One life. One reality that split or reproduced and passed consciousness to a second life simultaneously creating a second reality. Then this process repeated itself and created more consciousnesses, all, or at least some, of which were capable of splitting/reproducing themselves and creating new realities and consciousness. Just like a virus spreads and reproduces under the right circumstances.

So as new consciousnesses keep multiplying and reproducing, our infinite loop of consciousness, our universe, keeps getting even more infinite. Just like a car on a journey that gets further away from it's destination the closer it gets to it, from any and every direction.