I was at a dinner yesterday night where I started discussing something that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time and I completely messed up the articulation of my point. I figured I might be able to do it more clearly if I wrote it down, so here it is.

The definition of “real world” is different for everybody. For me, my real world is school, View from a Farley, and all of the other extracurricular activities I take on along with a little bit of a social life. Most of the people I know would say something similar. I often forget, however, that my real world lives in parllel to everyone else’s. I live in the same world as a dying person in Myanmar or a homeless person right here in the United States. In my day-to-day life (and I imagine this is similar for other people), the people in Myanmar are not always on my mind.

As I try to become more knowledgeable in any number of fields, I’m finding that it’s important to keep in mind all the “other people.” The people who I don’t see on a daily basis and who I will most likely never see. With so many things that seem so pressing, it is a big challenge to think of people I’ve never met. I’m trying, though.

And then I wonder if thinking about everyone else is enough. There are millions of people dying, what do they care if I’m thinking about them? Shouldn’t I be doing something? And I’m working on trying to help people as effectively as possible, but is it enough? (I’m working on some post-crisis relief for the tsunami zone, but that warrants its own blog post another time).

I’m beginning to think that my thoughts are as poorly articulated here as they were when I first expressed them, but what I’m trying to get at is a need for a complete mind shift. Instead of separate, parallel, real worlds, I need to start thinking of one real world with different parts. I need to make the parts of the real world that I don’t see part of my everyday life.

Let me know what you think. Also a hypothetical something else to think about: Is it worth thinking about something you can’t fix?