How Environment Affects Your Personality

I have always lived in the midst of the country, surrounded by flora and fauna with which i was taught to live in symbiosis. Shared between a dense forest and the Atlantic sea, two fantastic ecosystems hiding a wonderful biodiversity, I developped, like the other inhabitants, a philosophy of life apparently different from real urban people.

Actually, during a trip with my class, I had the opportunity to discover Paris for the first time. I was really shocked by the impassivity, the indifference, and sometimes the agression of the population toward the Others. We may live in the same country, nevertheless we may not come from the same "world". Our mentalities and behavior can be totaly antagonist.

Like Maurice Sashs said : "Concerning his species, human being is made only for hate and love. Indifference is due to our societies". Indeed, all the means to "facilitate urban life" promote acrimony, nervousness, self-confinement and make people narrow-minded. The subway, "the underground life", is the example of a useful and efficient means of transport but brutal and feared, where my friends and I have never seen so many stressed and oppressed people and crying children.

However, not only in France but everywhere else we can notice the same problem. Effectively, in a report about the Australian desert, I heard a teenage girl from the Outback say : "I have never been in a big city. It was the firt time that I saw so many people ; it was the first time that I felt so alone".

Moreover, the same happens in the United States too. A very interesting experience took place in the Washington subway. Indeed, a famous violonist, Stradivarius virtuoso, solicited by the most famous concert halls, Joshua Bell, played Bach and Schubert, after disguising his famous face. Violin case open before him, he begged the charity of passers. Nonetheless, almost none paid attention to him. People were irritated, anxious. They passed before him, disinterested and devoid of any curiosity. The musician wasn't recognized at his fair value... proof that all can be vanity, superficiality, and snobbery.

Indifference can't be innate in human being. We strive to be indifferent. Our way of life and our environment affect our personalities and our educations. It's normal that people in constant contact with nature and animals adopt a lifestyle that differs from those for whom technology, modernity, and big cities' daily-routine are more familiar.

Therefore, would it be possible to fight against the carapace, more or less formed by societies, which breaks human contact ? It is a topical issue which has preoccupied us for a long time. Effectively in the seventies, America, a famous american pop band evoked in their song “A Horse with no name”, a man who tries to escape from useless things of cities: “Under the cities lies a heart made of ground and human will give no love”. According to one of Christianne Singer's quotations: "Every passion gives the world another chance to break the walls of indifference, behind which humanity took its winter quarters".

Eventually, a closer look at what surrounds us helps us to discover the beauty of a thing we have already indifferently passed by a thousand times, getting closer to nature and its serenity could open our hearts to others while maintaining a minimum reserve.