I was sorting out my waste diligently when I encountered some Thermocol sheets. Unsure of where it was meant to go, landfill or recycling bin, I requested someone to google it on account of my dirty hands. Their response flabbergasted me. “How does it matter? Just stick it in the recycling bin.”, they said.
It made me pause and ponder about how did it matter actually? If I put it in the recycling bin, incorrectly as I learnt later, the whole lot would get contaminated and would never get recycled. Yes, in the grand scheme of things one bin may look insignificant but imagine if everyone thought so, hardly anything would ever get recycled, ultimately leading to a big impact on the environment. However, as with other things in life we believe our actions are so small and insignificant compared to the sheer magnitude of the task that we think it does not matter. Little do we appreciate that each individual and their action is a tiny drop that fills up the ocean.
When was the last time you felt powerless, felt inconsequential? Given the current state of the world, it was most likely yesterday, today or at least very recently. With a population of 7.8 billion on the surface of the earth, a lone individual is like a bee in a hive, one of the multitudes.
We feel powerless in making any material change to the world around us, other than complaining of course. We believe we are not the leader of a country, a decision-maker in a social media or media business or in any position of power that our single voice, small actions or a decision can make a dent, when in fact the power does lie in us, the public. In today’s connected world, power lies in numbers and in the domino effect created by those numbers and we make up the numbers.
Often, the massive scale of a problem deters us from taking action. We think global warming and climate change are so massive a problem and have the best and smartest brains trying to solve it, what can I do? Well, aren’t we the very reason they can’t solve it, as we do not listen and assume that our one plastic bag or one bottle will hardly make a difference. Imagine if one fine day all of us, all 7 billion-plus of us decided to stop using plastic bottles and bags, the problem will go away instantly. If the world population stopped eating meat for one day the effect on climate change would be dramatic, reducing carbon emission by double digits.
In the current case of the pandemic, we can neither develop a vaccine alone nor eradicate the virus and bring things back to normalcy. However, we can follow the guidance set by experts and stop its spread. Most of us have all seen the message about the candle that stepped away and saved the rest of the world. Our two cents worth of effort will prevent us from being added or adding others to the COVID positive list and help prevent its spread.
Let’s take social change as another example. We, the public, complain about equality, unfairness or even women’s rights and safety. We complain about the wrong candidate being elected when he won by a majority of a few thousand votes while we were one of the few thousand who did not turn up to vote for the right candidate. We complain about harassment of women in public spaces. We may not have harassed but did we step up to protest or help when someone was being harassed or did we turn a blind eye to it?
Research shows that people tend to helpless in crowded places as they own less distributed responsibility for their actions and tend to think someone else will do it. Meanwhile, if alone, they will make an effort to actually be the one helping as they are solely responsible. I believe it demonstrates that we do want to contribute but we are wired to think we are nonentities in a crowd and our actions do not matter, when in reality that is when it matters most as we can truly bring about change through our numbers.
However, taking action needs commitment and will cost us time, effort and maybe some money. For example, recycling diligently takes time and effort. I have to invest in buying a reusable coffee cup and more importantly remember to carry it for my takeaway coffee, whereas the single-use disposable cup is free and convenient. Did you know that 16 billion single-use paper cups are consumed for coffee every single year, which leads to 6.5 million trees being cut down, 4 billion gallons of water going to waste, and enough energy to power 54,000 homes for a year? So, if all of us carried our own cups we would be making a massive difference.
Of course, we do need to understand the larger issue, take a stand based on our ideology, make an effort to understand what we can do to help and only then do our bit.
The best example of this would be the very honeybee we compared ourselves to earlier. Beekeeper Marianne Gee from Canada gave a lovely TED talk where she spoke of the lessons she learned from honeybees. They have around six weeks to live and they spend it selflessly collecting honey, so their species can survive. They do not spend time overthinking the big picture, rather just get on with doing their bit. In their entire lifetime, they collect about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey but collectively the hive is able to make hundreds of kilos of honey.
Our tendency to think of the larger picture makes us feel inconsequential. Instead, we need to chip away at the issue without overthinking and our small contributions will add up, make an impact on our society and help create the world we want.
We have the capability to bring about change collectively, by working individually. Maybe it’s time we recognise our power and use it to cause some good, to produce some much-needed changes in our society, by taking a stand and contributing our share of honey.
Our 1/12th teaspoon honey counts! Together we can bring about change.
