Killing Your Trust, Your Life

One of the saddest things I see is people who cannot trust anyone else to have a valid opinion on them. Look out of the window and see how many older people are wearing clothes that conceal or suits, these are all people with a trust problem.

Not through choice, but because that is what life has taught them.

If I go shopping with anyone one of the hardest things is to get someone to go and try something on, and once you have managed that to actually look at themselves as a whole in a mirror. It is like being with a spoilt child, except this child might be 40, 50, or 60 years old.

I have the same problem with my images, people assume they know more about what I do than I do.

They don't. It is delusional to believe you know better, and delusional is sadly the norm.

I never show a negative image of anyone and leave it recognisable. If you can recognise yourself in one of my images and you do not like something about what you can see then you have a psychological problem that you need to overcome - because it is destroying a part of you and we can see it happening. So why deny it?

And the answer is that we are brought up to believe we are robots. I have to walk around with psoriasis visible all over my body, but I don't go around trying to force other people to deny it exists.

The thing is we really like people even though they are not a clone of some ideal, and it is the things which are different that make them memorable.

You might think that you have been short changed in life because you do not look like some famous actor, but we prefer that you make the best of what you actually are. And you cannot do that if you continue to live in denial.

Dreaming for Tomorrow

I quite often come across people who complain that something is not been done to their satisfaction because resources are being wasted elsewhere. And often they have a valid point. But not always.

For example, I saw some people complaining that Google Maps had wasted resources producing a 'street view' of the Great Barrier Reef' when their local streetviews were years out of date.

The importance of the undersea, barrier reef project is to dream the dream of a different tomorrow today. In order to achieve it you have to think about what you do normally in a new way, because you have a  new task, one where there is no book to guide you. In doing so, you create new tools, and then after a while you notice that many of these new tools would do the older tasks much better - quicker, cheaper, more effectively.

After all, if no one had dreamed the dream of internet mapping, the people who complain about their internet maps would have, instead, been complaining about their out of date paper maps. Except that without the internet, who would have heard them?