It is hard to grasp that we are living in a time where some people still live in the analog world, without internet or even without electricity. Meanwhile, some of us are gliding between shiny skyscrapers with hoverboard-like Onewheels, while listening an autogenerated playlist of their favourite music. The electronic beats blast through their cordless earbuds, while some people must fight every day just to survive. 

There are humans that have to scavenge for a living, in a toxic river. These fighters are hoping to find a piece of jewellery, that was left on a body of some rich person at their funeral. Some people can spend millions on a piece of art and some people live in extreme poverty, still sharing everything that they get. We even got people who dedicate their life to collect digital numbers on their bank account and other people who dedicate their lives to help other people in need.

We all have different kind of stories and point of views, all of them worth of sharing. The dreadlocked hippie laying in a colourful hammock probably knows something that a CEO of a multinational corporation will never know and vice versa. This is why we should share our views, rather than try to compete whose world view is “correct”. The western view of the world is just one of the many ways to experience this world. Despite these massive gaps and differences, we humans all are the same inside and we are on the same common path.

Global well-being has been dramatically increasing over the past centuries and at the same time we are facing the biggest challenges in human history. You probably would have guessed it wrong, but there are more than seven billion people on this planet, who aren’t living in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty has halved in the last twenty years. Because of our various biases, we tend to see the world much darker than it actually is.

At the time of writing this we are in the middle of a global pandemia, but we will survive this. We have survived past pandemias and this one won’t be any different. The more interesting question is why we aren’t reacting this aggressively towards climate change? After all, it is easily the biggest problem that our kind has ever faced. It’s like we are dusting our delicate glassware, without realizing that there is a giant boogeyman in the china shop. Hopefully the fight against this pandemia makes us all think how vulnerable and faulty our global system is.

When the change is this fast, it’s as if we all observe the world through old and stained spyglasses. These banged up spyglasses give us very narrow views of our reality and when our field of view is narrow, we tend to miss the bigger picture.

There are all sorts of spyglasses in our world and it feels like everybody is just shouting out their individual point of views at the same time, without trying to see the bigger picture. We drown in visual cacophony in a time when we should combine our lenses and to get a wider, more clear view of the reality.

We are living in a period of time where our habitat is changing faster and more comprehensively it has ever changed in human history. Project Muutos, a multiyear photography series documents everyday life of humans and it observes this global change and its many unpredictable paths.