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A post where we change our perceptions of looking at things and end up changing the world.

(Just a heads up: this is a part of the blog series ‘My Formula for Changing the World‘. If you haven’t read the previous post, you can go check it out. How To Change the world through Philosophy and Math? I’ll wait.)

Let’s get on with this post now.

Let’s face it, be realistic, you know.

This world is a sad, sad place. It is also a bad place but right now we’ll talk about sadness only because sadness overrules the bad by a huge measure.

Like, there’s more sorrow than the wrong that you could find. If you walked out of your house with eyes searching for an emotion, chances are you’d come across misery before you’d come across corruption.

It’s true. We all need to heal.

Sadness is also in a way a reason for the bad. At least that’s what I hear. I hear people blaming their bad qualities or action on the traumatic situations they faced.

And the thing is, that many people find this justified. People really think that if someone’s got a bad quality or does a crime or harms someone else, and that perpetrator has got a difficult past, then we should just pity them.

No, I won’t.

It’s true, to change the world you need to look at things in a different way, but sometimes—seriously, sometimes you just need to look at the thing in the very one way it needs to be looked at.

Your trauma doesn’t justify you being the reason for someone else’s trauma.

Think about that again.

That’s a personal view I just wanted to keep up here so you know what you’re getting into.

Now that we’ve got it out of the way, let’s proceed. How do you look at the sadness?

Suppose you’re in a café and you see a person sitting on the table next to you:

1. Looking, sad, depressed, or overly anxious for something. Maybe they sound distressed as they talk on the phone, or maybe they’re crying.

2. Under some form of pressure. Someone is inflicting some sort of pain on them, some sort of injustice or abuse.

What would you do in each or either of these situations?

When you come across injustice, or sorrow, or trauma, or any such emotion that evokes within you a feeling of overwhelming humanity and kindness, what do you feel? Aside from the sympathy for them, what do you feel?

Do you get this urge to change the current situations of the person who’s going through this? Or do you want to pretend indifference?

There’s a concept in economics, I’m sure a lot of you must’ve heard of it already.

Indifference Curve

The definition I read of it, of course, in my eleventh grade was—Indifference curve refers to the graphical representation of various alternative combinations of bundles of two goods, x and y, among which the consumer is indifferent.

This means, in simple words, that suppose if the consumer buys 2 units of good x and 1 unit of good y, or 1 unit of good x, and 2 units of good y, he’d still be indifferent between the two different combinations.

So basically it is the graph of a curve with presents the indifference of the consumer upon spending his income on buying a particular set of two commodities x and y.

So it’s not like I’m connecting economics to changing the wolrd, (though they are a pretty good combination and can be accomplished) what I’m just making use of is the simple concept of indifference curve.

There’s also indifference curve analysis.

So what’s said here is that as long as the income of the consumer is spent on buying combination of the commodities that’re shown on this line, this particular curve—the consumer is indifferent. But if anything goes beyond or below this curve, it affects the consumer.

So I’m just asking you to forget all the economic stuff, and use this graph to create your own indifference curve.

Until which point are you indifferent?

And which line does the other person need to cross for you to react?

What’s your limit—in economics, they call it budget, of course —but what’s your mental limit?

How far can you go, how much can you take before you stop being indifferent to it and strat wanting to take action?

This is an important activity, you’ll find the full procedure in the workbook which will soon enough be available for free when you subscribe for my email.

What you just have to do is find out your indifference curve, find out the things that lie below and above them.

This will be necessary so you can get out of your indifference curve.

Only when you’re out of your indifference curve will you start to want to change the world.

I’ll use this concept to speak of a higher one.

3 ways of looking at things. 3 ways of perceptions.

There are three perspections of looking at any given situation, or thing:

Inside the line.

Outside the line.

On the line.

When you just look inside the line, you leave space for improvement. It means that you could spread your horizon even wider and explore everything that you haven’t yet.

If you just keep looking inside the line, and don’t even drift near to it, then you’ll just end up being mediocre and I don’t think that the world is changed here in this space.

When you look on the line, you come across as “trying too hard.” I know that’s true. I personally think that since we humans aren’t perfect, like, at all, and we couldn’t ever achieve perfection, so it’s no use trying so hard to be flawless.

You might become the best, but you can’t become perfect.

As simple as that.

This line represents your indifference curve. This here is the comfort zone you’re living in.

When you look at something, see something bad, or distressing happening around you in the society, you’re indifferent. Not because you’re cruel or heartless. You’re just in your own comfort zone and what you’re witnessing might be depressing, but it’s not bad enough for you to consciously take a step in. You are just hopeful someone else will come save the day.

When you, however, expand your vision and try to catch sights of horizons that are out of your reach, when you try to dream about things no one else thinks you could get, when you work tirelessly for something that might not even exist, when you genuinely believe that you could change the world—then that means that you are crossing your indifference curve.

You’re going out of the happy zone.

You’re consciously looking off towards a higher state of being, and on the graph it may seem that you’re walking out of your capabilities. In reality you’re just dismissing your indifference curve and starting to perform for things that need to be focused on.

You see some injustice happening, you’re no longer indifferent, whether it affects you directly or not.

You just have to change it, you just have to make it better, whatever it takes. To be honest, this seems like going a little over-the-top.

But truthfully, this is how you begin to change the world.

Law of the World

So the world works on this one law.

Simple and sweet as it is, the earth works on this law, a sunrise for some is the sunset for others.

Dawn for half of the population, brings a growing night for the other half.

That’s literal, and metaphorical at the same time.

You can’t be happy all the time, because someone else needs to be happy too. And we humans aren’t equipped enough to keep every single person happy and thriving at every single point of time.

Some time or the other, life pushes you down onto your scraped knees and demands for you to get up.

The longer you stay down, the longer are you compromising with your future and your life. Only when you stand up again will your regain your control and your say in what happens in your life.

You need to regain this control as soon as you fall down.

Because you will.

Time has a task of making us stronger and better mindful as we proceed in life. So don’t think you could get out of it. You won’t.

Even in your own journey of changing the world, while you’re preparing your own fourmla, or reading mine, you’ll see some low moments when it all will look hopeless.

But there’ll also be those moments when you couldn’t be surer of yourself that you could do this.

You need to remember that when life will push you down, when your sunset will arrive, then your indifference curve and your confidence will waver too.

Maybe you’ll have to expand your limits or contract them to fit in. Maybe some days you’ll spend just living at the edge, here, the edge of the indifference curve, and you’ll want to do something worthwhile while you’re down, but you’ll have to wait.

In these times I think it would be just better to live in our comfort zone, our indifference curve.

To rise again.

A Case Study

Studying the Change of the World

While preparing this blog I conducted a case study with my sister. Since I couldn’t sleep, even at 12 at midnight, I shook her awake and asked her in a whisper, if there was one thing in the world that you could change, anything—didn’t matter what it was—what would it be?

“Huh?” She croaked.

I clicked my tongue and repeated my question, eager to get the answer because I was at last wondering if I had really made an important breakthrough for my formula.

And I was eager to just ask one person about this, and get to know their views, and then see if I can build any structure off it.

So my sister, after a contemplation of a few minutes, said, “I don’t think any change will bring a difference.”

I started to protest, wanting to argue with her and tell her that I needed an answer, not a philosophical discussion about whether the effort would bring any difference or not.

(She was doing a college degree in philosophy so it was more likely that she wouldn’t answer my question clearly and instead start off a hundred different threads of thoughtfulness and wondering about the universe.)

But what she said next, had me stumped.

“But if it could happen, I would change the number of people who think about change.”

The moment those words had reached my ear, I was sure I was in for some deep thinking. I asked her to elaborate.

“There’s a group of people who want to change the world. Then there’s a group of people who don’t give a crap.”

I chuckled at that.

“So,” I prompted. “You’d like to change the proportion…”

“Yeah, she said. “I’d like to change the proportion of people who think about change. So that more people did. Because as an individual, we can’t bring a change in the whole world. But as a community, a global community, we can. Heck, we really can.”

Because we are the world.

So it wasn’t technically a straight-away, clear answer, but it was definitely enough.

Okay, okay, so that was some great material for the blog, I figured.

And it was so true. So, so true.

“Like, we humans always have a way of coming back to our original bad habits and thoughts. We humans don’t want to change. We just like living on our indifference curve. And so, very few of us think about change to begin with. We wouldn’t change even if someone forced that change on us. Especially if someone forced that change on us. We humans are really solid, stoic creatures and a crowd’s will or thoughts never bend easily. We would only change if we thought ourselves about it and really wanted, from within our own hearts, to bring a difference in the world.”

Observations

So, my sister would just like to change the ratio of people who think about change and those who don’t. So that more people would actually want to see a difference rather than want to run away from it.

We all are afraid of change, that’s proven, because we don’t like the uncertainty or unfamiliarity that comes along with it.

That’s reasonable and so common.

But because one person can’t change the world, but many can, we “need” to change the number of people.

The good, want-to-bring-a-change kind of people should definitely be more than the rest. The more the people think about a new state of life, the more and the faster will the change come.

Because it’s the people the world is made of.

And we all set out to change the world. But all we do is end up changing ourselves.

We all have a world inside of us. We change it, we change the world.

Needless to say, the thing I learnt was that if the people change, so does the mentality of the crowd, so down the crowd itself, and at last, so does the world.

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