Have you ever heard the phrase “it’s
a small world?” If you are in the profession of pharmacy, you hear it daily. It’s
kind of our thing. We even have shirts. You think I’m just being emphatic, but
I actually do have that shirt. Anyway, this phrase is pretty poorly understood
in my opinion, so I thought I would explain it. The truth is, it is very much
not a small world. The world is quite large. You will never see all of it, and
other than what you learn about space it is all you will ever really know. So
why do we insist it is small. Because we are not actually referring to the
world, we are referring to our individual worlds. Our little bubbles we live in.
Those are quite small. This effectively makes the world seem smaller because we
forget that all of those things and people we don’t know are still out there.
For instance, you meet a new acquaintance,
and after getting to know one another, you realize you each have a mutual
friend. You comment on how it is a small world, but in reality, it was very likely
you would have a mutual friend all along. I did not give you any context, but
when you met this new person, you were most likely somewhere significant to you
personally. Perhaps you were at work, a social gathering, or a venue which
hosts whatever hobby it is you might have. In any case, unless you were wandering
around a field, you have some connection to this setting. And if you were wandering
around a field, and met another person wondering around that same field, you
likely have a mutual friend who also enjoys wandering around fields. The point
is, our connections are likely to be involved in similar activities to us, as
that is how we met them in the first place, and it is no wonder then, that
there would exist further connections within that same realm.
Even outside of your normal social
context, say for instance you were dragged to an opera at the local theater by
your significant other, despite you despising opera. Even in this foreign
context you are still in a proximal location. You might see someone familiar
owing simply to the fact that you are in the same city. Conversely, if you went
to a traditional Italian opera in Italy while on vacation from your hometown in
Appleton, Wisconsin, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who could point
out Wisconsin on a map.
When we stay in our familiar, little
bubbles, it leads us to believe that it is a small world, when in fact we
forget about the rest of the world that does not enjoy that same things as us,
does not live in a proximal region to us, or does not even speak the same
language as us. It makes us yell at the pharmacist who tells us the current
wait time is an hour, because we forget about the other thirty people who also came
from the ER in a great deal of pain to the only pharmacy open at 10:00 p.m. on
a Sunday. It makes us question how a politician who openly boasts about their horrible
policies could get elected because we forget that there are people who actually
agree with those horrible beliefs. Of course in the United States’ presidency,
it is due to an unrepresentative distribution of electors, but that is another
issue entirely. The point here, is that we convince ourselves it is a small
world, when in all actuality it is anything but.
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