Last week I noticed a girl at the supermarket checkout buying an array of tanning products. This reminded me of when I lived in China where everyone wanted to be whiter. The Chinese girls would lather themselves in skin-whitener and sunscreen, desperate to avoid a tan. I tried to explain that Europeans would pay a lot of money to have bronzed skin like theirs but they couldn’t understand it. I guess beauty is in the eye of the culture.

I find it fascinating how different cultures promote opposing values. If we never visited other countries we’d assume the status quo of our own country was fact, mindlessly absorbing not only the accepted definitions of beauty but also the millions of other values that are so culturally engrained they pass by unnoticed.

For example, in China I once helped my boss to invigilate a university English exam. About fifteen minutes into the test the students started getting up and whispering answers to each other. Outraged by the brazenness of it I was about to intervene when my boss put his hand on my shoulder, “Don’t worry about them,” he said, “they just like to help each other out.” At the time I found his reaction astonishing but I soon became used to it. The beating heart of the UK and Chinese cultures couldn’t be more different. China is a collectivist culture, stressing the importance of the group and social cooperation, whereas the UK is individualist, promoting ideas like self-sufficiency and autonomy. That English exam represented a perfect barometer for whether you were likely to achieve anything in China; if you had strong relationships you succeeded and if you didn’t you failed (but your score would mean absolutely nothing if you left the country and actually had to speak English).

When we come up against different cultures (such as I did in the above example) we can do one of two things: react with outrage and tell ourselves the people of that culture are doing everything wrong, or use it as an opportunity to explore whether the things we believe to be true are actually just opinions that have been culturally accepted as fact on a mass scale.

Make this a habit and you may even realise that everything is a reflection of your own perception, i.e., how you perceive reality becomes your reality. For examples of this, we need look no further than the myriad of occassions when two people share exactly the same experience but one deems it positive and the other negative due to cultural conditioning, mood, or general outlook. Such instances are evidence of how each of us creates our own reality.

Visiting a foreign land is a great way to bring into question longheld beliefs, but you needn’t travel abroad to become more adept at separating your cultural conditioning from reality. Bring more consciousness into your daily life and you’ll begin to notice hundreds of things you accept as true simply because your culture says so. This will not be easy (I spend my life forgetting to pay attention over and over), but it’s the only way to reach a more accurate picture of reality. If all this sounds too overwhelming then start small: perhaps by stopping to consider what’s really happening when you next pass the tanning products at the supermarket.