Worldview And Perception Quotes

“Belief in self and self-acceptance appeared to have a direct impact on one's resiliency and overall worldview.”
― Asa Don Brown , The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Perception and Worldview

“Traveling is not only the art of getting lost, but true travelers, in a sense, never return home. If they do return, they never see home the same way they did before leaving. They begin to see the foreignness of home after experiencing being at home in other foreign lands.
Traveling, I have learned, is not all about the touristy and the beautiful places as we see them in tourist guides. Traveling can be frightening in many ways, most important of which is the realization of how much sadness, pain, impoverishment, and despair exist next to, behind, under, over, and above the mountains, the blue lakes, the pristine beaches, the highly rated hotels and restaurants, the well-designed museums and historic and cultural sites, the fancy shops that, in many places, most locals can neither access nor afford. There are places so sad that the fanciest building one can see there is the airport! There are other places where the airports are run down and depressing, but once you step out of the airport, you discover that such places are full of life, meaning, and physical and spiritual nourishment. There are countries, namely the developed countries, where everything looks shiny and perfect, yet as soon as you enter, you encounter so much loneliness, depression, hate, racism, and lifelessness. Things are never as they appear at first glance. Traveling leaves us with more questions than answers – it is so bittersweet."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Base your understanding of the world on data, rather than journalism.
Journalism is a highly non random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period.

It is an availability machine, in the sense of Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic; namely - our sense of risk, danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes, images and narratives that are available in memory.

A lot of good things are either things that "don't happen" (like a country at peace, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news), or things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year, and then compound (like the decline of extreme poverty).

We can be unaware, out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many (although not all) things have gone better (not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better... and that paradoxically, as I've cheekily put it, progressives hate progress), but also that the best possible case for progress - that is, for striving for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive - is not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past; and that means: why should it stop now?”
― Steven Pinker

“There is something sad about traveling, because as you discover the enormous amount of life and living that exist in all these places and hidden corners, you are left with two contradictory feelings: first, traveling strongly confirms the idea that one can only see what one is intellectually, spiritually, and physically prepared to see…Everything we encounter depends on our palate in the same way tasting food is that encounter between the food and the palate. Second, there is something excruciatingly painful about leaving a place as soon as you begin to feel at home. There is a deep sorrow in knowing that all the things, places, lakes, wildflowers, animals, and people that we encounter will continue their lives without us. Even more painful is the realization that there are many more lives and much more beauty that we will never get to experience."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“As the number of oral cultures in the world has diminished, interest in them has grown, and one of the most intriguing questions is whether there might be such a thing as an ‘oral way of seeing’, a worldview common to oral peoples that might be different in some generalizable way from the worldview of people in cultures with writing.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The sun that lights your world is different from mine, that's why we have different climates.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“At the core of any unified set of people or society is a worldview that supports their way of reasoning and guides their actions.”
― John Mwafise Woloko, The Bible vs Theology: Lighting the Way

“Going farther is not enough – what matters is the extent to which we master the art of seeing, knowing, and sensing the world as we go farther. Perhaps only travelers who know how to get lost and even be vulnerable can get close to seeing?"

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako