Randi+Steiner+2014

E=mc² ====EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE and there’s no escaping everyone’s ignorance of that fact. The fact that you sprained your ankle, but the boy down the street lost his mom, and it’s so obvious what’s worse, but you’re still sad that you have a sprained ankle. And Daddy got you a Droid instead of an iPhone, but there are people that have never laid a finger on a touchscreen, but that doesn’t matter because you’re not one of those people. It’s challenging to appreciate the things you take for granted. How can you appreciate the clothes on your back when you’ve never experienced a moment without them? I know you won’t appreciate your cold toilet seat until you’re camping and you have to take a dump on a newspaper and bury it.====

====Everyone lives in their own little bubble where everything is relative to themselves and their experiences. That’s okay, though. It’s human nature, we all live in different environments. What drives me UP A WALL is when people pretend to know what it’s like beyond their bubble. Don’t pretend to know what it’s like to have never touched an iPhone. Are middle-class Americans not allowed to feel sad because a starving child in Africa has it worse? No, that’s not how it works. People have a right to live their life relative to their own experiences. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t care about those who have it worse, or that they should avoid being philanthropic. And it doesn’t mean that people don’t have to be grateful for what they have. It means that people should not criticize others based on intangible or extreme conditions.====

====When I say everything is relative, I MEAN EVERYTHING. You had a good day at school? That’s relative to school days. That day was not nearly as good as the good day you spent at the lake last summer with your friends. Relativity makes it impossible for subjective adjectives to have universal meanings. She said that the party was fun, but she also once said that the chemistry lab was fun, but that doesn’t mean they were both the same amount of fun. There is very little in the world that has no trace of relativity. Every opinion, every thought, and every action a human makes is relative to their life and their experiences.====

This theory of relativity and how everyone is so strongly influenced by their environments reminds me of the non-fiction book I read for the summer reading assignment. It was about how a human's interpretation of beauty is a biological adaptation rather than an environmental factor. While I have been ranting about how everything is relative, the author made an extraordinary point, backed by countless studies and information. She made it obvious that beauty was a sign of health and fertility, especially in woman, which is why men are more attracted to beautiful woman. Of course it is no longer cave man times, so people are able to look beyond beauty to find a mate. Now, humans live much more luxuriously, and have the option of not reproducing if they so desire. It is no longer necessary to human survival that every woman bare eight children, along with some extra to replace the ones that die in infancy. While beauty may once have been a biological factor, it has now resided to being a relative factor, along with everything else in the world.