I was just thinking of something...
We live in a highly individualistic society, and a society which seeks to blame others for a lot of what's going on.
We blame our parents for not spending enough time with us, or for mistakes they made raising us, or for being part of a generation that made poor political decisions.
We wonder why we aren't able to reach the heights we think we're deserving of -- why do we have to work so hard for so little, to never get a boat or a big SUV, or a brand new car?
But then I get to thinking about the fact that we're temporary residents of this Earth, and for most of us we've got more time behind us than ahead of us, it feels like we're asking the wrong questions.
There's a particular genre out of China called regression where someone goes back in time to an earlier part of their lives, and another called cultivation where people use special knowledge of the world to become the strongest, and these two combine to create a very specific genre of the regressor-cultivator. These are stories of using your knowledge of the past and your secret knowledge of the world to do better in a new life. Reading these stories I can't help but think of them as representations of people's secret desire to have and raise children and give those children a better life than they had.
In this way, we use our accumulated wisdom for another throw of the dice -- a better throw. Knowing where the pitfalls lay in our "first lives", we can fight to confer wisdom to our children so they can get that better throw.
There are two futures ahead of many of us: In one future, we disappear, we cease to exist entirely because we spent our fleeting time on earth chasing better for ourselves. In another future, we live on through our genetic progeny, but more importantly through the culture we have a chance to create in new family stories that could be passed down for generations.
Many people want "a legacy" that involves changing the entire world, but when you think about it, the miracle of being able to change just one life is something worthwhile in itself (and even better if it's more lives, good people should have lots of kids if they can). You don't need to "save the world or destroy it" as many narcissists in my generation might say, you just need to protect and improve your little corner of the world. And it isn't about money, it's about time and effort and care.
Those who cultivate humanity's next generation don't simply plant a seed and walk away. To do so is not to fulfil the duty written into our existence. Instead, it's to plant that seed, help it sprout, care for it, provide fertilizer and keep weeds and insects away, water it and watch for disease or problems with soil conditions. Our farmer ancestors would spend much of the growing season working from sun-up to sundown, and through the summer months the work would not end, and in the autumn there would be as much work as ever, long days from sun-up to sundown, harvesting the crop and preparing for the winter season by nurturing the soil, planting winter crops, and preparing preserves for long winters ahead. It wasn't easy. A lot of people failed along the way, but this back breaking labour build civilizations, one acre at a time.
Imagine for a second, 4 billion years ago, and a lightning strike hit a puddle of goo, and the first amino acids formed. A while later, those amino acids started to combine, and eventually the building blocks of life happened to over countless natural experiments became structures that built themselves. A goo of life without even things we consider natural such as cell walls, and that life survived and thrived and sometimes faced mass extinctions, and that goo is your ancestor, as are single celled organisms, as are sea creatures so strange you'd be awed by their bizarre looks, as are all the steps to the small warm-blooded creatures who survived the long winter caused by the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, and those tiny creatures are your ancestors too, and they were given the spark of life, and they carried it for a time, and they passed it on. And over millions of years, aeons so long that even microorganisms could build mountains such as the white cliffs of Dover, which are made out of tiny sea creatures that lived and died and their corpses created mountains, and that spark from the very first puddle of goo continued to be passed on. Through early hominids, to modern humans, and from using rocks as tools to finding metals, to the industrial revolution, to the information revolution, and all the while that spark keeps being passed on, and deep in your blood there's lessons perhaps going back as early as that puddle of goo 4 billion years ago hiding there, driving you to live on and pass on that spark, up until your grandparents, and your parents, and now you. And for many people they will take that miraculous 4 billion year spark passed down from a puddle of goo and extinguish it. How selfish. And just imagine, some of these selfish creatures believe they're saving the world in doing so!
For people who think they're very important, it must be a shock to think about how small they are in the great chain of life. For those who think they're very unimportant, it must be a shock to think about how critical they are in passing it on to the next generation.
With the creation of modern man, a second spark was created. Our brains are layered. The reptilian brain deals with the basest of instincts and fundamental life systems such as the beating of your heart and the breathing in your chest when you don't think about it. The mammalian brain deals with emotions and different kinds of memories. The Human brain is genius, and can predict the future, knows good from evil, and knows that one day we will die, the heavy price we pay for that superpower. The mammals can remember their lives, but humans invented recorded history. The story of 7 Pleiades sisters is interesting because the cluster of stars that make up that constellation appears to only contain 6 stars, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, there would have been 7 stars. The story of 7 sisters, and one of them disappearing was passed down for that long, and how many people don't think it's worth remembering? How many stories from our past will be erased so we can focus on meaningless pop culture created by people who hate us? That second spark is our culture, and it's far deeper and goes back far longer than we can understand.
Although I criticize pop culture, that doesn't mean the second spark is something to be kept locked up in a cage never to be released. Culture in stasis dies. In addition to passing on the intellectual lineage of our ancestors, we also must work to contribute our piece to that story. It means reading the classic stories, and creating new stories. And some of those stories are small stories for your small corner of the world. Pass on the story of your ancestors because that's a tiny spark within a spark that will certainly die if you don't pass it on.
I also speak of family, but that doesn't mean I'm limiting my viewpoint to just a nuclear family. The nuclear family structure itself requires individuals to build social networks with the people around them even if they aren't family, and we need to build those bonds because a single family of a father, a mother, and 2.5 kids cannot truly thrive. We need friends, we need community events, we need to go outside and see people who we perceive as friendly because otherwise your little slice of the world becomes too little.
Moreover, even the most diligent farmer can't monitor his fields 24/7. Eventually everyone needs to sleep, and in those moments perhaps birds come and eat all your seed? Building a community you can trust is to spread out that burden, and passing on that second spark of culture is to build scarecrows and wire fences to protect from animals and birds.
To bring this back to the beginning, does what I'm saying that we should never think as individuals, never act as individuals, and that all personal success is meaningless? Of course not. For many reasons. The world will write the unworthy individuals out of it regardless of grand designs on passing on the spark of life, so individuals must fight for their future. One must fight to be worthy of survival. One must fight to be worthy of reproduction. One must fight to be worthy of staying in their children's lives. One must fight to be worthy to raise their children right, one must fight to be worthy of being remembered. Community can support good people, but the good people must build themselves as well because it is carried on the strong backs of the community members.
We live in a highly individualistic society, and a society which seeks to blame others for a lot of what's going on.
We blame our parents for not spending enough time with us, or for mistakes they made raising us, or for being part of a generation that made poor political decisions.
We wonder why we aren't able to reach the heights we think we're deserving of -- why do we have to work so hard for so little, to never get a boat or a big SUV, or a brand new car?
But then I get to thinking about the fact that we're temporary residents of this Earth, and for most of us we've got more time behind us than ahead of us, it feels like we're asking the wrong questions.
There's a particular genre out of China called regression where someone goes back in time to an earlier part of their lives, and another called cultivation where people use special knowledge of the world to become the strongest, and these two combine to create a very specific genre of the regressor-cultivator. These are stories of using your knowledge of the past and your secret knowledge of the world to do better in a new life. Reading these stories I can't help but think of them as representations of people's secret desire to have and raise children and give those children a better life than they had.
In this way, we use our accumulated wisdom for another throw of the dice -- a better throw. Knowing where the pitfalls lay in our "first lives", we can fight to confer wisdom to our children so they can get that better throw.
There are two futures ahead of many of us: In one future, we disappear, we cease to exist entirely because we spent our fleeting time on earth chasing better for ourselves. In another future, we live on through our genetic progeny, but more importantly through the culture we have a chance to create in new family stories that could be passed down for generations.
Many people want "a legacy" that involves changing the entire world, but when you think about it, the miracle of being able to change just one life is something worthwhile in itself (and even better if it's more lives, good people should have lots of kids if they can). You don't need to "save the world or destroy it" as many narcissists in my generation might say, you just need to protect and improve your little corner of the world. And it isn't about money, it's about time and effort and care.
Those who cultivate humanity's next generation don't simply plant a seed and walk away. To do so is not to fulfil the duty written into our existence. Instead, it's to plant that seed, help it sprout, care for it, provide fertilizer and keep weeds and insects away, water it and watch for disease or problems with soil conditions. Our farmer ancestors would spend much of the growing season working from sun-up to sundown, and through the summer months the work would not end, and in the autumn there would be as much work as ever, long days from sun-up to sundown, harvesting the crop and preparing for the winter season by nurturing the soil, planting winter crops, and preparing preserves for long winters ahead. It wasn't easy. A lot of people failed along the way, but this back breaking labour build civilizations, one acre at a time.
Imagine for a second, 4 billion years ago, and a lightning strike hit a puddle of goo, and the first amino acids formed. A while later, those amino acids started to combine, and eventually the building blocks of life happened to over countless natural experiments became structures that built themselves. A goo of life without even things we consider natural such as cell walls, and that life survived and thrived and sometimes faced mass extinctions, and that goo is your ancestor, as are single celled organisms, as are sea creatures so strange you'd be awed by their bizarre looks, as are all the steps to the small warm-blooded creatures who survived the long winter caused by the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, and those tiny creatures are your ancestors too, and they were given the spark of life, and they carried it for a time, and they passed it on. And over millions of years, aeons so long that even microorganisms could build mountains such as the white cliffs of Dover, which are made out of tiny sea creatures that lived and died and their corpses created mountains, and that spark from the very first puddle of goo continued to be passed on. Through early hominids, to modern humans, and from using rocks as tools to finding metals, to the industrial revolution, to the information revolution, and all the while that spark keeps being passed on, and deep in your blood there's lessons perhaps going back as early as that puddle of goo 4 billion years ago hiding there, driving you to live on and pass on that spark, up until your grandparents, and your parents, and now you. And for many people they will take that miraculous 4 billion year spark passed down from a puddle of goo and extinguish it. How selfish. And just imagine, some of these selfish creatures believe they're saving the world in doing so!
For people who think they're very important, it must be a shock to think about how small they are in the great chain of life. For those who think they're very unimportant, it must be a shock to think about how critical they are in passing it on to the next generation.
With the creation of modern man, a second spark was created. Our brains are layered. The reptilian brain deals with the basest of instincts and fundamental life systems such as the beating of your heart and the breathing in your chest when you don't think about it. The mammalian brain deals with emotions and different kinds of memories. The Human brain is genius, and can predict the future, knows good from evil, and knows that one day we will die, the heavy price we pay for that superpower. The mammals can remember their lives, but humans invented recorded history. The story of 7 Pleiades sisters is interesting because the cluster of stars that make up that constellation appears to only contain 6 stars, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, there would have been 7 stars. The story of 7 sisters, and one of them disappearing was passed down for that long, and how many people don't think it's worth remembering? How many stories from our past will be erased so we can focus on meaningless pop culture created by people who hate us? That second spark is our culture, and it's far deeper and goes back far longer than we can understand.
Although I criticize pop culture, that doesn't mean the second spark is something to be kept locked up in a cage never to be released. Culture in stasis dies. In addition to passing on the intellectual lineage of our ancestors, we also must work to contribute our piece to that story. It means reading the classic stories, and creating new stories. And some of those stories are small stories for your small corner of the world. Pass on the story of your ancestors because that's a tiny spark within a spark that will certainly die if you don't pass it on.
I also speak of family, but that doesn't mean I'm limiting my viewpoint to just a nuclear family. The nuclear family structure itself requires individuals to build social networks with the people around them even if they aren't family, and we need to build those bonds because a single family of a father, a mother, and 2.5 kids cannot truly thrive. We need friends, we need community events, we need to go outside and see people who we perceive as friendly because otherwise your little slice of the world becomes too little.
Moreover, even the most diligent farmer can't monitor his fields 24/7. Eventually everyone needs to sleep, and in those moments perhaps birds come and eat all your seed? Building a community you can trust is to spread out that burden, and passing on that second spark of culture is to build scarecrows and wire fences to protect from animals and birds.
To bring this back to the beginning, does what I'm saying that we should never think as individuals, never act as individuals, and that all personal success is meaningless? Of course not. For many reasons. The world will write the unworthy individuals out of it regardless of grand designs on passing on the spark of life, so individuals must fight for their future. One must fight to be worthy of survival. One must fight to be worthy of reproduction. One must fight to be worthy of staying in their children's lives. One must fight to be worthy to raise their children right, one must fight to be worthy of being remembered. Community can support good people, but the good people must build themselves as well because it is carried on the strong backs of the community members.
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