Some of it’s parts
Only a few decades ago, there were no such things as desktop computers; people did that job. We had to be fully present and aware in the real world or some fantasy world we made up in our head from some story someone told us, or one that we read.
We are also living longer than generations before, so end-of-life diseases are novel and unresolved by previous recombinations of DNA. Every replication that has led to our existence is influenced by experiences of past lives. In the nuclei of each cell, of every set of parents, there exists magical microscopic codes filled with information that their parents passed on to them. The cohort of survivors that endured some of the greatest tragedies of history produced some of the most pivotal insights and inventions of the human experience. It seems the longer our lives get, the more we forget as a collective.
The grandparents of millennials know what true suffering from scarcity feels like. They constructed a world that is secure according to an established status quo. It involves insurance policies, retirement funds, and savings accounts, because those safety nets provided the comfort they lacked as a collective in their childhood. They remember going to the dump to find food and working from age seven to provide for the rest of the family. Because of this, they may heavily rely on themselves and work ethic, if they learned anything from history. Even those that were sheltered from the atrocities of the wars and famine were exposed to the horrors of the rubble that remained after they were over. They deeply yearned for an entity to tell them everything is going to be okay. So they created systems to trust hoping they could make the world a safer place for their progeny.
It was a nice gesture, but an endeavor that would prove to be impossible to accomplish and actually has the potential to be more harmful than good. By removing the struggles in life, we naturally become accustomed to their absence. Should they arise again (or something worse), we will have no mechanism for handling them. Safety is a subjective idea anyway, as it is relative term. We cannot make the world a safer place because the world is always changing. There simply is no way to account for all the risks, so the only way to thrive is to be adaptable as an individual, and from that, as a collective.
To operate in a collective we must physically and mentally collaborate. But we are losing the ability to do this on the individual level resulting in a reflection of that on larger systems. Our attention is focused on fear of missing out, keeping up with the lives of people that have no impact on our life whatsoever, and participating in the rat race to nowhere. The chaos of our current cultural situation is a direct result of allowing ourselves to ignore all the red flags that are leading us to our own demise. We continue on the path, only evolving our technology and speech to make things more convenient and easier to stomach. The individuals that continue to struggle will likely survive harsher conditions if they do not kill themselves with intoxicants and other vices that make life more bearable.
Barely anyone pays attention to what is really going on in the physical reality. We’ve separated from one another fixated on a world that fits in our pocket, losing so much of the human experience that involves participating in community activities and sharing ideas. Envy arises in sectors of scarcity where there is brutal competition for recognition, such as the entertainment industry, academia, and the corporate world. Wrath erupts when things don’t go the way we expected or we aren’t treated how we ought to be. We have lost the plot because we stopped looking in the right place. All the while, others (even younger) suffer excruciating pain that results from their bodies being cramped into one position for several hours doing desk work that we were not designed to do. Many of us disconnect with mind altering drugs (legal and not) or pacify ourselves with everything from sugary to erotic pleasures to numb the pain of existence. Meaningless existence. This validates the idea that mind separated from body results in a broken spirit.
If our mind can no longer communicate with the body, our connection to the external world is severed. It is the very situation that makes dementia such a difficult disease to watch progress. The soul inhabitant of that body loops the only information it can in order to continue to participate in life. It just keeps running that same damn program, stuck in restart mode. For the patient, a time exists where they become aware of their memory fading and this leads to an existential crisis when they are no longer able to connect with the present by using the context of the past.
Instead of recognizing we grow from the pain and adaptation not from ease and acceptance, we’ve made life meaningless. Convenience has made life meaningless. We are validating ourselves as a collective with false pride. Unearned pride. Superficial pride. Pride does not require group consensus. This need for acceptance results in nothing but quick fixes and cheap thrills. We lack hardiness anymore and we are evolving into creatures that cannot survive in the world we inhabit. We are breeding ourselves into extinction.
We should be utilizing other minds to expand our sense of identity, but many choose to allow the collective of minds to close them into a box. The operative word is ‘choose’ in that last sentence. No existence can fit into a box with a single label. Positive feedback is easy to handle and validates us. Negative feedback encourages us to work harder unless we feel the world owes us something. The lack of fulfillment is a result of not knowing what we need, only seeking what we want externally to fill an internal void quickly. Urgency is a big indicator of limited resources, be that time, money, food, attention or any other sort of sustenance; anything that provides us strength and nourishment physically and mentally. The connection of mind and body is spiritual, that is why we fold our hands in prayer. To bring right hand to left hand and observe ourselves as the soul within this vessel.
The response we have to any situation is the only aspect of a scenario that we have control over. Our response exhibits our level of desperation. It is not the completely fulfilled individual that will complain about circumstances. Nor would that person look to others for sustenance, as they will have already provided for themselves. If that isn’t an option, a trained mind will wait or take action, but with the recognition that it must rely on instincts and not trust in any external entity.
If I am my only observer there is no third party that requires trust. I do not need others to validate me, for my eyes can do that just the same. Potentially even better because my eyes remain a constant witness to my mind. They, the window to our world, connect us to ourself just as the hands pressed together in prayer. They contain a reflective tissue that projects the image of our universe. What we wish to see, is what we see. What we choose to encounter, is what we encounter. Wherever we direct our attention is where our attention is fixed.
The most difficult lesson I’ve learned recently is that everything I do in this life is up to me. It is a challenge to know that I can rely on no one else until I have found a deep trust in my own ability to discern the bad actors from earnest actors. The greater the number of perspectives, the more dynamic that average becomes. Even more so if I am mindful to include sources that vary greatly in their opinions (and from my opinions). Since all possibilities are possible until one is happening, everything is subjective unless we develop a strong sense of our own intuition. Our intuition can be felt through the body. We physically express our interal feelings unconsciously. From eye-shifting while telling a lie, to folding our arms when angry, non-verbal communication is a part of language and culture. It is inherited and manipulated through experiences and then passed down to the next generation for survival.
Odds are, we won’t survive (literally), and it does lead me to wonder if this has happened before. If some sort of consciousness continues to evolve here but somehow becomes disconnected from the source. If this keeps happening because we develop amnesia as a society. Consciousness is a reflection of our experiences and our reflection on those experiences. It is the experience and the body is our temple. That temple holds our entire universe and all the lives that resulted in our existence. All the stories that have preceded our birth accumulate as decisions, responses, and results of those move into the next generation. If we choose challenges to test us as a species it will make us a stronger bunch, indeed, but only those genes that survive the conditions we are creating will continue into the future. Don’t be a snowflake. Be a lotus and rise above the shit but also recognize that you can only bloom because shit exists.
