Global Social Landscape

Many people have been asking me about my Australia trip and want to know what I saw or what I did. When I try to remember the best places that I went, I begin to realize that for me, the trip was never about the locations. My interest has always been people and I spent most of my time observing and interacting with the different people of this planet.

Everyone knows America as a diverse country but Australia might actually be the most diverse country in the world. Many of the people there of a different ethnic origin were actually born in another country. We have a lot of ethnic backgrounds in the US but many of us don't identify strongly with our cultural heritage, especially if our ancestors came over many generations ago. The fact is that we are just Americans raised in America. This is our culture and this is our country, regardless of where we came from originally.

In Australia I had the opportunity to interact with the Germans from Germany, the Taiwanese from Taiwan, and the Israelis from Israel and was afforded an opportunity to meet and learn from all the cultures in the world in one convenient place. One of the requirements of the 12 month working visa is to be under the age of 30, so all of the travelers in the working hostels are guaranteed to be under this age. I began to notice patterns in regard to the age at which certain nationalities choose to travel. Most of the Europeans were between 19 and 23 and some had been away from home for several years already. At 24, I felt like I was young to be doing so much travel and I was surprised to find that I was older than most of the people from Western nations. I also thought that 9 months was a long and ambitious trip and I had to reevaluate my feelings after meeting so many people younger than myself who were going on their 3rd year away from home.

One of the most striking observations I made was the effect of different lifestyles on physical health. Most of the Asian travelers were between 27 and 30 but you wouldn't know it from their appearance. Many of the girls who looked 21 turned out to be 29! This got me thinking.. hey, our Asians don't look like this. They have exactly the same genetics but they tend to look closer to their actual age. The only difference between the two groups that I can think of is lifestyle. These people with the youthful appearance eat diets of mostly rice, noodles and vegetables, sometimes with a SMALL amount of meat. Their Asian-American counterparts tend to eat less healthy than this (sometimes a lot less healthy) and now that I have a basis for comparison, it's very easy to see the effects our food is having on our bodies. The Asians eat small portions of healthy food and we're tucking into half a cow with one green thing on the plate for decoration. They drink a little beer or rice wine and we're smoking cigars and shooting whiskey. OF COURSE we are going to age faster than them. It's so obvious when you stop to think about it but we never do. We go on with our habits and watch our elder Americans dying of heart disease and cancer while we convince ourselves that we will experience a different fate. It's ludicrous.

I, for one, have learned my lesson. I am eating healthier food and drinking less alcohol. I urge you all to do the same.