Meanwhile on the other side of the planet

Lately my thoughts have been trying to grasp the massiveness of humanity on the earth. Right now I’m sitting in a house typing at a computer listening to some music, (mumford and sons the cave not that it matters) and thinking and I am alone. I live in city of 100,000 people I am related to one person in this city who isn’t here right now he is presumably about 3 blocks away the nearest kinship relation I have beyond that is several hundred miles away. In that distance how many more lives are there what are all those people doing right now

Expand that out further to just the US the third most populated country on the planet over 3 hundred million people meaning we are only one fifth the size of India and a sixth the size of china

What does that mean well if you are standing in a line at a store in the US and there are 5 people in front of you the same line in china would have 30 people in front of you and in India it would 25

Just coming to terms with the numbers is one thing but what are we, all of us humans, doing at any given time.

How many people are doing exactly what I’m doing, a lot because typing is the primary means of how most language is passed on from person to person these days. Listening to music is common, you can hardly go any place in an urban environment and find silence and given humanities current desire to live stacked on one another the population density in urban environments is staggering you would think it would be impossible to be alone.

But I am and so are millions of other people.

Millions of other people are with other people. Some they know some they do not know some are happy, angry happy, in love, arguing and the multitude of things we do with one another

Someone is being born right now
Someone just died
Someone had sex perhaps for the first or last time
Someone just ate something
Someone hasn’t eaten and will probably die of starvation before the end of the day
Someone can’t decide what to wear
Someone has only one set of clothing and they wear it every day
Someone just got hugged
Someone just got slugged
And the list could go on an on and on

In every single minute over 6 billion people have done something all at the same time

Imagine if we could get all 6 billion people to do the same one thing all at the same time

Say that would be to jump up in the air and land … would it be enough to cause any seismic activity?

There is a person in the Amazon who is as far as scientist can tell the last of his tribe. A man who lives alone in the jungle and has for most of his life at some time he had a mother and father and perhaps other tribesmen but for what ever reason he is the last of his people. He is protected, the government forbids anyone to trespass in his territory and he has killed at least 3 people who have attempted to invade his territory.

I know about this person and anyone else who has read about him knows about him but largely most of the world has no idea that this man exists in the Amazon. Are there other men or women like this man that we don’t know about.

What does this man think is beyond the area that he knows and can he even fathom a skyscraper or even an airplane or space travel, submarines and all the other things that we take as common place in our world.

In our world what do we really know is going on in the lives of the 6 billion plus lives that fill the earth

The commonality of all of is that we all do the same things every day, eat, sleep, love, laugh, work and all the things we do there is so much that is the same every single day.
We celebrate the same occasions and mourn the same losses

Laugh when a friend falls and then quickly make sure they are ok but then laugh some more, not to make fun but to share that in life that we all fall down physically or emotionally but life goes on

Cry at the same losses the death of family and friends and other things which cause us sadness.

We all experience rage and ire at the wrongdoings which are primarily the same things there is very little difference in the core things we find to be wrong across all ethnic, cultural, national ,moral and political lines we are really very similar


Right not somewhere someone has kissed someone else and they are in love and it will last a life time but I will never meet them or the children they will someday have together our lives will never cross and most likely they will never meet a single person I know but we can all relate to that couple and the future they will have even without knowing them if you read this you thought about them and I’m sure your thoughts were happy ones and hopeful for people you’ll never meet. They are as real as anyone you know, why do we spend so much time thinking about how different we are in our lives when so much of it is the same

It isn’t even just our time we spend most of our effort and work on things which focus on our differences but how different are we really from one another.


Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015

The happy ending business

The happy ending business, no not that sort of happy ending but the fah-la-la-la happy ending business, the, and they lived happily ever after sort of thing … this is not my business.

It is a pretty safe bet that people wish my business was the sort of thing that made it all better, but it isn’t that sort of thing … or at least not on the surface of things.

Yesterday another worker compared the work we do to assembly line work and I see his point. All the cases we get have specific things that have to be done and it becomes very much an assembly line mentality. We even say the same things over and over again in documents, meetings, every contact in one case is handled the same as in any other.

The droning machine that we are building isn’t a device, but humanity.

It is easy to fall into the idea that the world is a bad place and nothing ever gets better if all you see is bad.

The whole of the world lies, cheats, steals, takes the easy way, they don’t do what that need to do and on an on.

It never gets better and it never ends.

But it does sometimes get better and it does sometimes end but we just don’t see that part of it.

I’m sure that there are studies that burn out of factory works on assembly lines is higher and the front end of assembly than at the back end.

At the front end it is all the same it never slows down it is just do this and do that but what you do doesn’t make the whole but as you move along in the line it gets better and better … the person who does that last task gets to enjoy the satisfaction of making a product every single time it gets done.

Ask that worker, what did you do today I built 5000 widgets or what ever

Ask that first worker the same thing, nothing important, same shit different day, or something along those lines.

But that person did as much as the last person just at a different stage.

We don’t see the good things happen all that often it’s bad all the time 24/7/365 bad news, on top of worse news, covered in garbage.

But things do change Real life Super Hero Guy works with a kid who was part of the bad news a few years ago… that worker who ever it was who dealt with the same kid a few years ago only knows that kid from then, bad things happening for no reason but this kid is doing better there are still bumps but it’s better

Things change and the widgets we build with the same tools don’t turn into the same end product we just don’t see those people again.

We do see the recalls hey this wasn’t done right the last time it needs to be done over which ads to the bleak picture that people are just bad.

One of those assembly companies has ads now building themselves as good guys but how they are doing it is connected the makers of the products they build that get put into other things …for the builders it’s all well did that but they didn’t see the work they did do any real thing just gets shipped away and you make more. These workers get to see the product and product users in the ads

And at first I thought well that’s dumb why wouldn’t you see what you did or understand how it fit into the end product, but largely you don’t always see how your effort is connected to the next step.

I wrote a thing on interconnectedness back some time ago about how some ditch diggers 40 or 50 are as much responsible for my morning coffee as the bean growers and pickers without them the water in my house wouldn’t be there for me to put in the machine that makes the coffee and the those workers and the cup maker and hundreds of people all for a single moment of ah… now that is good coffee.

I’m sure that wasn’t the circuit board workers thought when he put that together for the coffer maker, you know invisible don is really going to enjoy coffee from this machine of 2 to 3 years before the product breaks and he has to buy the next coffee maker I make for him or the ditch diggers thought, or the potter, glazer, electrical and all the other workers.

My point is while it may not be such a nice picture from you point of view, even the Mona Lisa is just a blob of black or brown up close but take a few steps out and you see that each of the brush strokes builds on another and another and stepping back further the picture because clearer and look at it long enough what may initially seem like a melancholy lady is perhaps smiling a little bit, or you can be envious of her because she can see what Leonardo was doing and it is her secret which you can never know.

Taking the steps back or taking the time to see the bigger idea that is the work and there is a happy ending there some where but it might not be in your life time. Just like light that leaves the sun now won’t get here for another eight minutes and light that we see in the stars was sent when the dinosaurs were on the earth

We may not know what mark we make on the world but we all do in some way change the echo of humanity in some way.



Well, that’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely

Happy Birthday if it’s your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it isn’t your birthday

Thank you for reading, please subscribe, you know if you are reading this on blogspot or on diaryland. If you are reading on face book well you are already subscribed. Aren’t you happy.

Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood.

Ciao,






PS 3 Gamer Tag: invisible don

PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015