First World Problems

First World Problems are problems that aren’t really problems. For example, when you can’t decide what flavour ice-cream you want to eat, or what shirt to wear, or which movie you want to go see at the cinema… these are all First World Problems. They are not a matter of life and death; they are often enough a matter of too much choice.

I was faced with a First World Problem earlier this week when buying stamps. The problem in question: should I choose fish or Australian birds as a stamp design? Each were equally pointless. They were just going to be stuck on an envelope for payment for postage.

Thousands of stamps across Australia are used every day. I would imagine that number would be in the billions for the world. And yet these stamps never stay the same for long. New designs are constantly being implemented. That made me wonder; who actually makes the art for all these stamps? You can see on the box, and even on the stamps themselves that they are created by official artists and designers. People actually get paid to design stamps… something that is simply stuck on a folded piece of paper and carried around a bit before being thrown in the bin. They would work perfectly fine if they were just a plain rectangle with a value amount written on it.

In fact, most of what we use in our everyday lives doesn’t have to be the way it is. Your dinner plate would work just as well if it was made from white plastic instead of painted glass. Your bed would work just as well for sleeping in without colourful sheets and decorated covers. Your walls would serve the same purpose for shielding you from the weather with no paint.

The point is, nearly everything in our everyday lives has been taken that further step in luxury… a step that is taken to simply entertain and please our senses. Millions of people live with the bare necessities. For many of us in First World Countries… we don’t know what it’s like to live like that. Our entire lives are built around extra. This excess of colours, designs and materials creates a society that has too much. There are too many options, too much choice; too much colourful smoke shielding us from the rest of the world. We don’t know what it is like to go without.

I am not saying that we should throw out everything bar the bed we sleep on and the food we eat, the choices the modern world offer us is something we are meant to enjoy. But perhaps the next time you are debating a little too hard whether or not you should have a strawberry or chocolate milkshake you should instead think about whether or not the answer really matters in the wide scope of things.