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First in Thailand then in Bali and finally in Cambodia, one of the most remarkable aspects of travel is how uncomplicated many of the local people are. There’s much less rushing and less evident anxiety than back home. Fewer seem trapped in their heads. They seem to have more time for relationships with people and healthier relationships with work.

It’s easy to romanticize and universalize this tendency. The wise Asian culture, living in balance and in the present. But there’s (limited) truth in some stereotypes, and this one rings true for me.

Yet even this ideal has its downsides. Trash, for one.

Trash is something the West frets about. Anxiously we split our copious garbage into castes: noble compostables, tolerable recyclable plastic (check the number in the recycling symbol on the bottom!) and finally the sinful landfill.

Naturally we grouse about it. And we still produce far more than our fair share of garbage. But at the root there’s a genuine concern and a real social consensus about being more responsible with our refuse.

Not so in simple, live-in-the-present Asia. Plastic is used and wasted here with unselfconscious abandon. In Thailand you need to make a special request in order not to receive your street food in two plastic bags. A single satay of meat on a (biodegradable!) bamboo skewer will come with a plastic envelope (to keep the sauce next to the satay) and a plastic bag with handles to carry it around. To carry it around for the 2 minutes it takes for it to disappear into my stomach.

In Bali, the smell of burning plastic is common. A most poisonous form of recycling.

Why is this so? There’s no need to look for complicated reasons. It’s just simpler to use plastic for everything then toss it. Nothing to clean. And it’s cheap.

This is a reflection of the nature of our technology: how it has gotten to the point where our natural instincts are maladapted. Anything natural which is abundant as plastic would be harmless to use and toss. Just as the palm leaves, flowers and rice are in the ubiquitous Balinese offerings. Industrial plastic is abundant but also harmful. It requires an industrial waste solution, one which isn’t obvious.

The flip side of the more natural relationship with life over here is a more natural relationship to convenience.

In the West it’s the striving for progress which imagined turning black oil seeping from the ground into astonishingly versatile plastic. And perhaps this less natural and more complicated relationship to life, driven by abstractions, has a silver lining in being able to deal more comfortably with abstract, longer term and far away problems its inventions create. At least, I hope so.