#04 What if the City..?

This week we used the ‘what if/what is the city..’ statements to initiate discussion and debate which proved useful as it helped us generate ideas and allowed us to think on a broader level.

I took my imagination for a wild ride and started thinking of things like ‘what if we were bring monitored 24/7 through CCTV cameras?’, ‘What if you could stop time whenever you wanted to?’ These statements then changed to ‘what if the city..’ and that just instantly hit me and made me think about the times we as humans have mistreated the city we live in; global warming, climate change, noise pollution, air pollution, marine pollution etc. So that just immediately made me think ‘what if the city doesn’t want us anymore?’ and ‘what if the city had emotions?’ because if only the city had emotions and a voice to fight back, we wouldn’t do what we have been doing to it. From discussing the ‘what if’ statements we drifted towards talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. This topic made us realize how fragile mental health is and why it is so important. One of the feelings millions of us are experiencing during the current coronavirus pandemic is loneliness. In our combined efforts to stay safe and save each other’s lives, our usual ways of seeing family, friends or just familiar faces have been put on pause. Most of the countries are in a lockdown as governments have introduced strict social restrictions. There’s restriction on eating out, meeting friends and family, meeting in public spaces and even on something as basic as going to the grocery store. We discussed how the idea of social interaction has changed because of COVID and how everybody’s scared to meet in public and private spaces and how this is affecting people’s mental health. Everything’s moving away from face to face contact to virtual meet ups or phone calls and this is something we don’t want to see happen in the future.

Here's a mind map that I made to help understand how COVID has impacted our lives.

However, the longer the pandemic goes on for, the more these feelings become long-term and long-term loneliness is associated with an increased risk of certain mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and increased stress. This reminded me of a video I saw almost a year ago on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OURBpPLewoU) called ‘Rental Families to Heal Lonely Souls in Japan’. 

There’s a company called ‘Family Romance’ which offers a very unusual kind of service, renting a family. The video shows a man who uses this service around 3 or 4 times a year where a mother and daughter come for the day and act like his family. Since his own wife had passed away, he uses this service to remind him of his own little family. As Japan’s elderly population is growing day by day more people are ending up alone. This concept of renting a family seemed extremely foreign to me and was very hard to absorb. It made me think of the current situation around the world and how COVID has negatively impacted almost everyone's life. Loneliness led us to having a discussion about how important it is to be there for each other and to be conscious of our surroundings.