
Interconnected – Day 6
30-Day Writing Challenge
Let’s go through a simple mental exercise…
What would happen to you if the sun burnt out? What if all the plants died? What if we removed all the oxygen from our atmosphere?
How would you cope…?
Roughly 12,000 years ago when the agriculture revolution began, we began to abstract ourselves away from nature as if we were separate. This mentality is deeply ingrained into society’s collective consciousness today and we struggle to realize what we’re doing to the most valuable things on our planet (plants, animals, air, water, etc.).
If we think through the above exercise, we quickly realize how interconnected we are to the world around us, and without any of these necessities, we die – fast. For some reason, this realization is something we struggle to internalize.
For example, let’s talk about Gold… People dig this stuff out of the ground, sell it, and the new owner places this into a bank vault somewhere. We’re literally hoarding chunks of rock because they’re supposedly “rare”, but when it comes to the air we breathe and plant life that feeds us, we sh** all over it (figuratively and literally). If that’s not insanity, I’m not sure what is.
Don’t misunderstand me… I’m not coming at this from a hippy tree-hugging position.
I want you and everyone else to look at this from a very practical point of view. We, humans, survive on very few things (water, air, and food), and if we lose any one of these we die… We’re ridiculously fragile water bags walking around on this blue rock.
The faster we realize how interconnected everything is, the better off we’ll be when making short-term and long-term decisions. And yes… I know it takes a lot of effort to set aside our egos when making decisions, but that’s where the true abstraction needs to happen.
Instead of abstracting ourselves away from nature, we should spend a little more time abstracting ourselves away from our egos… And maybe… Just maybe humans will stick around a little longer.