Getting outside your bubble (or what Great Yarmouth taught me)

Last night I found myself in Great Yarmouth.

It was the final night on a tour of Norfolk and we’d booked our hotel based on a logical route back to London as opposed to any desire to actually visit this seaside town. As such, we’d not looked into what there was to do there or much about the place at all.

And, with 100% certainty, had we done this research beforehand we’d have sought accommodation elsewhere.

From a satellite view, Yarmouth looks like a beautiful stretch of white sandy beach. And on all accounts it is, it’s just that the entire waterfront has been taken up by casinos, carnivals and take aways. One of the friends we were with joked that the wind farms we could see on the horizon were stationed there simply to power all the flashing neon lights of the town. And to be fair, it wasn’t that improbable.

As we’d been in the car for most of the day I decided to get some fresh air by going for a run along the boardwalk. I figured that it’d be a popular route given it was so flat and right on the water.

However, in the 6km stretch I ran I didn’t see one other runner. In fact, I didn’t even see a walker. Instead, I observed overweight kids dunking doughnuts into tubs of Nutella, discarded fish ’n’ chip trays, elderly people sitting on the pokies, drunk stags, and promo girls handing out fliers for ‘behind the curtain’ shows at local bars.

When I got back to the hotel my desire to have a shower wasn’t just to rinse off my run; I genuinely felt grimey.

This continued on when we started searching for a place to go for dinner. Naturally we consulted Trip Advisor in the hope that something half decent would crop up. However, when ‘Fish ’n’ Grill’, a seafood equivalent of KFC, came up as number 6 we realised we would have to take what we were given. We ended up at an Indian joint located on a street which was blocked off to cars owing to a huge fire that had engulfed a row of commercial properties two days prior.

That evening as I was going to bed, I couldn’t help thinking “I can’t understand why anyone would want to come here. It’s terrible”.

However, it was this exact question that made me pause and question my train of thought.

Recently, I’ve tried to force myself into going beyond ‘not understanding’ something, particulary when it comes to the way other people might think or behaviour. If something exists, it exists for a reason; not seeking to understand why and settling for ‘I just don’t get it’ is a very insular world view. As such, when I started wondering why on earth anyone would come to Yarmouth I knew I could either ignore it or try to understand it.

I decided to go back to the Fish ’n’ Grill reviews on Trip Advisor, and as I suspected the comments were very complimentary:

“Great atmosphere, really cheap”

“Excellent food in lovely surroundings”

“Food was yummy — great for the kids”

“My daughter loved her burger and she’s a burger expert”

“One of the best meals I’ve had in my life”

Yes, the brightly lit fast food joint serving fried fish for a few quid had been ranked as one of the best meals of someone’s life as well as regularly scoring on ‘atmosphere’.

I then thought back to the pier arcade and all the young kids running around trying to find 2p coins in the slot machines and scoffing candy floss at pace. It was the school holidays and this was their summer holiday. It was probably a highlight of the year for them; something that their parents had put money aside for as a special treat. I couldn’t think of anything worse, but this was big for them.

Now, before I go on, I feel it’s pretty important to underscore that my point here is not to be condescending. I’m not judging these people or the culture that exists at Great Yarmouth at all. My point is around the lack of awareness we have for other people, their circumstances and what value sets other people live within.

Too often we judge based on our own standards without thinking for a moment that our benchmark is something we have manufactured for ourselves based off our own personal circumstances. No matter how great we think our own standards are, they’re never something we should project on other people.

This concept was something I was most acutely aware of in my old role as an advertising agency planner; the purpose for which is getting inside the heads of any consumer segment to understand what makes them tick.

Half the time though, that’s not what is done. More often than not it’s easier to make sweeping generalisations about people rather than really get to the heart of cultural nuances that may differ based on things like location and socio-economic status. And this is where a lot of advertising falls flat. It misses the mark because it fundamentally doesn’t understand the mark.

But this point goes well beyond the world of advertising. This resistance to understand other people is what divides societies and causes unfound, unjust stereotypes. It’s actually a much deeper challenge facing society, and one that is definitely more convenient to ignore.

Take Brexit. The London bubble had a serious shock when the vote swung in favour of Leave. I remember that Friday well, and the overwhelming sense was a despairing: “I just don’t understand what the leave voters were thinking”. But really, how could anyone expect to understand what they were thinking when they’d never taken the time to see things from their point of view or to get inside their day to day frustrations; to exist within their place in the world?

If we look at the geographic breakdown of the people who voted leave, and then looked at the age brackets, there is no way their perceptions of politics, influence and the economy would be even remotely close to those of the remainers.

And is it their fault that this is their world view? Of course not. People only know what they know. It’s a dangerous assumption to think the luxuries of education are anything more than that: a luxury.

If we never take the time to learn empathy and extend ourselves beyond our own value set, we will continue to exisit in an irresponsible state of ignorance.

Yarmouth might have been the closest thing to a dystopian nightmare I have ever come across, but that’s simply how it exists within my world view. Who am I to judge if it’s the Disneyland of the UK to someone else? All that says is their view of the world is different to mine. I’ve no doubt there are people out there who’d look at the way I live my life and feel puzzled or even shocked at it. And that’s ok because that’s how living on a planet of 7.4 billion people works.

If we, as a society, could inch toward a wider acceptance of perspectives we would be moving closer to a more aware, conscious world community. And given the political climate in the UK and US right now, anything that creates room for understanding as opposed violently opposing views would be a positive thing to see.