In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the original entry “Earth: Harmless” was expanded after extensive research to “Earth: Mostly harmless.” Whether that still holds today is open to debate. By intergalactic standards, it probably does. But now and then I wonder what aliens would think if they watched what goes on down here. Would they smile, amused? Stare in silence? Or sit at a bar in the evening with other extraterrestrials, sipping a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and puzzling over what the earthlings hope to achieve with some of their habits? A change of perspective like this shows how subjective our judgments are and how much of our rituals is simply habit.
Deadwood
“You know what I find most absurd about the earthlings? Every year, when the days get shorter and colder, they swarm out and buy dead conifers. Some of them even chop down their own specimen in the forest. Then they put it up in their caves and hang all kinds of trinkets on it. Maybe that distracts them from the fact that the little tree keeps drying out. Then they wrap lots of things in lots of colorful paper and put them underneath. Hours later, after the whole arrangement has been sung at for a while, they rip off the sometimes quite elaborate wrappings and throw them away. Often just a few days later, the tree ends up on shared ground outside the caves too.”
Ride Units
“Oh, that’s nothing. You know what’s really crazy? These rolling units, everywhere. Every cave has one or more of them parked outside. Sometimes earthlings climb in, usually alone, even though they go to great lengths to make the unit as big and roomy as possible. They use it to move to another place. But 90 percent of the time, the thing just sits outside their dwellings. And even when they do drive, they often get nowhere, because so many of them are doing it at the same time in the same place. The units also spend a very long time waiting in front of light poles. When the top lights up, you stop. All that waiting in their units annoys the earthlings more and more, yet many of them still insist on carrying on exactly the same way. And so they can get from one place to another in their units at all, there are hard, wide, gray stone surfaces everywhere. They have covered the whole planet with them. Seems inefficient to me.
There are also longer rolling containers for several terrestrials at once. But many terrestrials absolutely want to stand in their own container. Since they have built so many of their caves packed tightly together, you might think the earthlings care about living together as a community. Then again, maybe the idea is to make more room for parking and roads for these ride units, because they really are everywhere, sometimes stacked on huge floors, sometimes in individual boxes. Every two years, most earthlings urgently need a new ride unit, even though the old ones are pretty sturdy and last a long time.
Oh, and many units have an opening where you pour in a toxic, finite liquid. It gets burned inside the unit so the planet can warm up a little more. Maybe they want it to be summer all the time?”
ForcePoint
“No, I don’t think so. (Takes a sip.) Because even when it’s nice outside, they usually sit indoors, in their units or in their caves. I keep watching the earthlings, and I’ve found something else that’s strange. Some of them get together very regularly, either in the same place or connected by energy, and press keys with their fingers to create virtual things. They call it ‘programming.’ I found that rather funny, because they’ve actually achieved a lot of networking and communication that way. They’ve even improved how they cooperate a bit. They call it internet and software and apps, or something like that. Anyway, they want to build really clever things, but the way there is often very inefficient. Day after day, they sit together in meetings staring at so-called ForcePoint presentations. Apparently it matters a great deal to criticize something irrelevant. The more specialized the empty phrases sound, the better. At the end, they come up with new tasks and meet again soon, always in a different lineup. The odd thing is how little time is left for what they actually set out to create. And ForcePoint gets used for pretty much everything: reports, documents, descriptions. Go figure: they have so much technical potential and waste their time on trivia.”
“Yes, that really is absurd. You know what? We should suggest a change to the guide’s publisher in Ursa Minor. Instead of ‘Earth: Mostly harmless,’ let’s make it ‘Earth: Mostly harmless, absurd in places.’ Cheers, to the Earth!”
Why a Change of Perspective Helps
We judge things and give them our own meaning. Whether something makes sense or is absurd is subjective. What matters to one person seems silly to the next. And still: just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it makes sense today. Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems. What helps: take a closer look now and then, stay critical and change your perspective!
