Culturedness

Travel is the easiest route that people choose to make themselves seem interesting and to feel interesting on the inside. I guess it is easy enough to mistake the pleasure of being in these new exotic, far away places, surrounded by people from foreign cultures, by culprits of their foreign heritage, art, food and music, and taking pictures and videos and selfies as a symbol of cultural immersion in on if itself. But is it? Does this surface level shallow form of cultureness really qualify for, well, being cultured?

What I would like to explore is the deeper realism of it all, what immersing yourself to new horizons should actually look like, what steps and actions allow you to truly absorb the world around you on a deeper level, the level that genuinely expands your ways of thinking, deepens perspectives, bolsters your wisdom, openness, self knowledge and growth.

We may all know someone who hops on a plane every other weekend, even if solely for bragging rights and esteem dynamics, or simply the fun of it, and that’s ok. It’s true that it’s fun, it’s true that it helps to reset, escape the mundane, de-stress and re-compose. It’s also true that it’s romantic. So yes, there’s many great benefits to be gained, don’t get me wrong. But what I find to be misguided, is this default unchallenged presumsion that travel in on if itself configurs you into a more cultured, interesting, wiser and multi faceted human being.

What prompts me the need to challenge it, is coming across so many instances where it’s simply not the case. If you scan through your circles, you’ll probably find that the most well travelled aren’t necessarily the most well cultured embodiments of human wisdom, and instead, possibly the chasers of the misguided currency that the romantic elements of travel plugs into our brain.

I simply think that there is this misguided notion that routinely over attributes all the positive growth related factors to travel, instead of looking elsewhere, to the more reliable daily habits and choices that we make.

What likely contributes more to the equation, are the type of people you choose to surround yourself with, how different and diverse those people’s perspectives are, do they challenge yours and how you process that challenge, does it expand your ways of thinking, are you regularly putting yourself in uncomfortable yet psychologically beneficial new situations? What books, movies and music do you consume? Are they diverse, or are they unilaterally the same tone and genre that you got into 10 years ago? You get the point.

And how do we know, how do we read and define ones culturedness anyway. Does it still resonate, or is it simply this obscure term that used to mean something and now faded away into the background, because we all mix and surfe the world and have access to the internet, and TV, and are interconnected at all times, so in principle, we are all cultured, right?

I think it’s a very interesting public debate worth having, i.e. what defines being “cultured” in a first place, in this era of open AI, continuous never ending public discourse of wrong and right, cancel culture, political correctness, virtue signalling, and the cult of self. Does this virtue of culturedness still stand, or is it an outdated quality begging for reinvention?

I can only speak for myself, but I think everything, every little thing and detail about us signals the story of culturedness, the story that signals how far we’ve come from our ground 0 starting point. We were born in (x), with the resource of (y), and the access to (z). Now this is relative, but overall, I believe it’s a fairly clean slate way to look at it.

Because everything signals and leaks these ques of well developed identity and culturedness about you, or lack there of, i.e. the simplest of things, like the way you talk, the words you choose, your accent, slang, the way you dress, the way you do your hair and makeup, the way you choose to communicate with the world, even how much you choose to consiously reveal about yourself. Your political correctness or lack thereof, the places you spend your time in, the way you engage with the world, the music you listen to, and the list goes on.

We process these ques so organically, so subconsciously, that before we even get asked the question, we probably know the answer, whether someone you know fits the bill, whether you’d like to invite them to be a part of your social fabric, associate your own narrative and become a part of your own inner form of sub-culture. We make those choices and judgements every day, for better or worse, consiously or unconsciously, sometimes we just overlook the “why”.