Social Sustainability

The term of social sustainability was brought up during a chit chat with friends last night. While having a cup of tea at a food court, we saw the behaviour of customers and some common characters. There are people paying full attention to what happen at their surrounding and even a petty thing cannot escape from their eye. There are people talking with loud voice without considering the disturbance to others. There are people walking around scouting for opportunities, either they are selling or trying to snatch. There are people sitting quietly at a corner and seem like losing themselves in this concrete jungle. There are people making an effort to catch attention from opposite gender. We are wondering how to melt these diverse cultural background and, perhaps individual agenda and priority together, if we are talking about social sustainability. In this respect, we are talking about sustaining the friendship. The argument is simple, if we cannot manage friendship with a small group of people, it is perhaps more difficult a task to manage a much more larger social fabric.

Friendship sustainability is achievable if both the parties are sharing the same vision and caring for each others as well as willing to scarify individual egoism for the betterment of the friendship. Having said this, the starting point must always be knowing each other well first. Sometime when starting a conversation, we tend to forget to introduce our strengths and weaknesses, or even ourselves first and most of the time it end up with more confusing rather than understanding.

So, perhaps next time and first thing to do in meeting a new friend is trying to introduce yourselves briefly, friendly and of course with enthusiasm.