What would you do to deal with global "globalisation" in 10 or 20 more years?

What is globalisation? According to Oxford Dictionary, globalisation (American: globalization) means the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale. But to keep it simple, it is something happening really fast in the world, improving and affecting the whole world, and we as young individuals might not keep up with it if we didn’t have any strategies.

Globalisation is basically a form of development -which is very natural in every aspects of life- but in a larger scale. “Fast-paced international development” could be used as a description. One of the main effects of globalisation is the “division” of the world to “first world” and “third world”. People often associate first world with rich and developed, which is not completely wrong. The third world are more often thought as poor and developing countries. It is true that rich countries are more developed than others. In reality though, both first and third world are still developing. Now here’s where the problems come in. The poor countries need to survive. They have growing citizens to feed and take care of, which usually lead to lots of hunger, drought, and all sorts of national problems. Because of various factors and the world’s cruel rule, the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.

Well, as the statement I made before, because of how rapid globalisation is happening, not everyone would be able to keep up. We as humans need to develop as well, not only physically but also mentally. These development of course happen naturally, and are usually parallel to our ages. But to be able to survive in this modern age, we need to develop our mind to another stage, which also functions as a means of increasing our competitiveness compared to our peers.

To do that, we need to start thinking critically and creatively. As one of the young generation myself, I believe that we have big potentials and we can change the world if we want to. Let’s stop thinking about complicated things for a moment and take a note of the words you are going to read. You can change the world, the whole world, if you want to. Now why are there so many problems in the world that look like they couldn’t be solved? Looking back to the problems in the third world, it is not like there is nothing we can do. There are a lot of things we can do to help, and it is just a matter of heart. This can be traced back to globalisation, which has been triggering lots of improvements in the technology section. We have gadgets, internet, televisions, social medias, and all sorts of things that we can access freely. We can see disasters happening around the world each day. But we feel like we can not do anything. Or maybe we just don’t want to do anything, because we think that it is not our job to do that. We might not be able to directly send help, but globalisation might just make us feel a little less empathetic.

And what do I want to do to deal with this situation? In 10 or 20 years the world would have changed completely. It wouldn’t be the world we know today. There will be improvements, there will be setbacks, there will be new things, and there will be things that do not exist anymore. Will we, humans, still be on earth? Will this planet continue to give us life? Will globalisation have stopped happening? I believe I can only answer the last question. Globalisation will not stop even in the future. Humans are very difficult to satisfy. We might even be able to say that humans can’t be satisfied. That way, people will keep on trying to improve and develop what they have had, innovate and create what they don’t have yet, and no one will wait for you. In the modern age, individualism has grown wild. We need team, of course, but you have to work on your own to develop yourself. That is why we need to set some goals about what we want to achieve. What we want to be.

To connect this topic with my education and career choice, I will tell you some things that make me choose Psychology as my next level education. Some of you might have seen and felt the gradual loss of empathy. As time goes by, it is most likely that people will feel less connected to other people. Here is what I want to prevent. We must remember that as human beings we still need to be social. Maybe you are an introvert like me, but even we can’t deny that we still need connections to other people. I want to be able to reconnect people and remind them that they need to love. They need to care about others. We need to care about others, especially in the future, where people would grow even more apart from each other.

For me, personally, globalisation makes people feel less emotions. Sure, technology keeps us close, but there is an essence of meeting someone in real life, physically. It makes people feel more competitive, which isn’t bad, but we have to remember to maintain good relationships with others. I really hope that people would open up their mind and take all the positives from globalisation, minimalising the negatives, and still keep their heart open to other people.

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Written by: Nathasya Cornelia (XI-A5/33)