I’ve written about all of this before, and yet it’s still something that amazes me if we imagine through history.
You’re born into an environment that’s artificial beyond the natural challenges. Nowadays, natural challenges are rare, it’s humans we mostly have to worry about, those creatures like ourselves. They are like ourselves, remember that.
A little over 2,000 years ago, you might have been born into the wonderful life of being a peon – the odds are much better for that than what many written stories and movies suggest. Statistically, less people on the planet.
The peon could run away somewhere else and disappear, or move to the top of the mountain to avoid people only to have them show up asking for advice. That might have been a nice option for the hardy individuals.
Nobility, too, was born into – like wealth is born into today.
So let’s go further back. Let’s say your parents were hanging out with the crew drawing pictures of deer in the caves, your mother did a swish of the tail just so and… 9 months later you show up. Childbirth wasn’t very easy then for mother or child. Suddenly, you’re in a tribe, including that whacky guy who keeps wandering around chewing on poppies. What’s for dinner? What the tribe gets.
What the tribe gets. So that’s pretty much changed, hasn’t it? How often do you hear of a group of people born into a group working together? I know, in a perfect world we might call that family, but in a family the goals aren’t always aligned – unless it’s Disney. Everyone has their own thing going on.
What else?
If you go back far enough, the focus was on ‘staying alive because our environment will kill us’.
Slowly, we pushed back on that environment. Thousands of years later, nobody’s worried about the environment hurting us. It’s the other way around, but we’re more worried about all the civilization stuff that comes with it – paying bills and other things have become more important to use as individuals than worrying about the environment killing us – and us killing the environment that will kill us.
When did that happen? When did we cross that line? I wonder.
