Always faulting others instead of reflecting on ourselves 🙄

Do you ever notice how much our societies have normalized complaining about others for their shortcomings as a way of avoiding or taking responsibility for our own?

I reflected on this a bit while on a tamashii fulfilling trip to Japan, because in the west, it’s common to hear cross-cultural complaints addressed at others, such as the Japanese.

Phrases like, ‘Oh, Japan has a huuuuge trash problem!’ …as if we don’t as well…

Or ‘Japan has so many single use plastics, it’s terrible for the planet!’
…sure, but could that potentially be negated by the incredibly efficient transportation system they have that keeps billions of cars off the road a year..?

Or ‘they still commercially hunt and kill whales, it’s so unethical!’
…sure, but we’re still commercially clearcutting Oldgrowth forest ecosystems, yet those ethics are rarely brought into question…

All of these complaints are either hypocritical or completely distractionary, while utterly failing to create real solutions. Imagine how much energy we waste bickering over who’s doing what better or worse than another, when instead we could just put that energy into doing things better by doing them differently…?

At the end of the day, Humanity has a consumption problem that needs to be addressed through fundamentally shifting our worldview to one that recognizes our place as part of these ecosystems, not a part from them. We are all flawed, we are all cussin’ up somehow…so maybe instead of getting hung up on what the other is doing wrong, we look at ourselves and just start doing better already? 🤷‍♂️