Editor’s Letter – Summer 2023
There seems to be a bit of a rose-tinted nostalgia that gets cast on things in the past. It is always easy to filter through news headlines of escalating crime, poverty rates, inflation, global warming, and whatever else is driving click throughs for the day, and generally imagine that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. There is nothing new about this, of course. The “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra is by now an aged cliché. But the way we consume our information about the world around us has certainly evolved. News and politics are contained to a morning newspaper or a TV slot after dinner. We carry an ever-updated pipeline to it in our pockets. It is fed upon and regurgitated again through various social media feeds. Even LinkedIn descends into a cesspit of pseudo-expert opinions on how the country should be run, how crime should be dealt with, and how we are all screwed.
These might be valid points and I’m not saying that any of those headlines aren’t reality, but it is certainly a condensed, concentrated element of the world fed back to us in a constant supply. And I wonder if that has clouded how we view the world. It’s easy to see the worst when it’s packaged and designed to trigger our biological dopamine drive that propels us further and further down a feed. There are certainly things that we need to deal with and there are some things that are awful about the world that we live in, but at the same time, we have the potential to be constructive about the things that we need to address.
A wonderful way to do this is to inspire change by celebrating those people and those organisations that are shifting the dial in a number of areas. In this issue, we profile Tax Management NZ, a highly profitable New Zealand success story that has not only shaped the tax pooling industry here, but is dedicating 100 percent of all profits to solving some of our most pressing social and environmental issues.
Also in this issue, we profile the talented writer, director and producer, Nahyeon Lee who is going up against generations of cultural tokenism, homogenisation and all-out racism with her new play The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom. Of course, there is also our usual mix of travel, art, success, health and entertainment, because even with the bad headlines, life really is a wonderful gift to be enjoyed.
