Prudent or reckless?
Natural or wrong?
Legal or illegal?
Subject to regulation or a personal right ?
Anecdotal and irregular? A growing reality?
Mandated by necessity? A matter of choice?
Sign of the times or example to avoid? Sharing or distressing?
Real or photoshopped?
Something to scream about, to smile about, to think about?
And Now The Scenarios
There’s a few more ways to go about this picture and tap into what it has to say.
Let me identify five of them…
Scenario 1: Inequality
This picture represents the inequality of the modern world, a world where some are affluent enough to use a motorcycle as a personal vehicle of transportation, one or two individuals per vehicle, whereas others have to pile up, five, six, more, at any given time, because it’s the only way for them to get around. The perfect example of how unfair the world is.
Scenario 2: Overpopulation
This picture points at overpopulation and how we grow too fast. Resources aren’t enough, as things stand, and have to be hogged for people to get by, putting a strain on the planet and, in effect, each other.
Scenario 3: The Analogy
A model for how we’ve been treating this planet’s ecosystem i.e. hogging it, revving it, riding it all at once, with one goal in mind: to get ahead, while neglecting to realize that it can only do so many miles and take so much strain before breaking down, injuring some of us in the process.
Scenario 4: The Future
A vision of the future. With the mad party over and austerity setting in, resources have to be shared. Energy can’t be wasted on one person alone, it needs to be put to maximum use, serving as many individuals as possible. Food, fuel, housing space, all kinds of utilities and resources have to be saved and maximized. Individual and personal space gives way to shared and collective space where everyone shares things with each other in order to make this planet more efficient, the economy more viable, and our society less prone to individual abuse, setting everything back to sustainable mode.
Scenario 5: A Different Future
Another vision of the future. With the mad party over and austerity setting in, resources have to be rationed and people reined in. Energy is no longer wasted on one person alone. Individuality is substituted by a sense of collectivism. Personal space and all use of equipment is disallowed in an effort to curb the wastage caused by free markets, and individuals are molded into sharing everything, setting off a new age of sharing and sustainability.
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The scenarios are not mutually exclusive. Mix them up as you see fit. Having said this, let me close up with a little thought experiment:
Let’s assume that there are not enough resources to go around. What follows is that we ought to use them more efficiently. To do so we have to tone down our rhythms and share more. Yet sharing increases usage, putting a strain on equipment, causing malfunction and breakdown. It also increases exposure to one another, which leads to tension, confrontation, and disease. To avoid tension, confrontation, and disease, one needs more personal space and more control over one’s affairs i.e. more freedom – of movement, thought, and resource utilization – which brings us back where we started, a world where we waste resources and lay everything to waste.
Just something to think about when going about our business, eager to improve the world.
In the second part, I’m proposing a way out of this conundrum.
In the meantime, remember that sharing is like greed: