When I first heard that we were going to tour the fishing village in Phang Bay, I was hesitant. After all, the village is very small, and it seemed like we would be stomping through their backyard for the sake of our own “immersion.” But after we were greeted by a man from the village, and I learned that the boat company was familiar with the community, my reservations disappeared.

Walking through that community forced me to question my posture towards global politics and development. Here is what I wrote on the way back to the hotel:

My political orientation is shaped by my relationship to terms like inequity, inequality, and overarching ideas about what is moral and just. These serve to connect my beliefs to something greater; they form a seemingly global, connective posture within my political outlook. But other than that, they mean nothing. They do not ground real time experience in other cultures or anything like that. I don’t really know. It is just truly impossible to understand anything and there is no way to talk about it without making some assumptions that subjugate peoples’ experiences.

I think what I was trying to get it is how terms like inequity, inequality, which may be empirically true, can lead to the use of words like suffering, which can diminish the agency of the people whose experiences those terms are intended to capture. In the past, I’ve used this language to demonstrate that I get it: the power dynamics within the international system, the outsized share of emissions produced by developed countries, and the disproportionate impact of climate change on poor, low-lying countries. All of is true, to some extent, but if anything, this trip has shown me that there is no “it” to get. The world is huge and there are increasingly political and economic links between each part of it. But as an individual, I think it is important to be cautious in how I connect empirical evidence about the state of the economy, ideology, and values because while they may seem revelatory, they may serve to create more rigid points of comparison that make it easy to not learn anything specific about the community. So maybe we should all abandon our attempts to get “it,” and instead take the path of someone like Joshua Morris who learned a language and dedicated his life to one place.