Here are some tricks to help see the existing world in new ways and hopefully shine a different light on the water we’re swimming in and come up with new solutions in the existing world. Or just make you giggle.
Fundamental #1: Life is dirt and sunshine, full of ocean.
Every bit of energy, movement, heat, light, thought, and life in the world comes from our sun (with very few nuclear exceptions). It shines down on the world; the plants take dirt and marry it with that sunshine and fill it up with water; we eat the plants and break down those bonds to make ourselves. Complex life is just dirt and sunshine full of ocean.
And it’s not just that we do this once; we run out of ocean every few minutes and sunshine and dirt every few hours.
We are constantly remaking ourselves and trying to maintain our own complexity.
And we will eventually, inevitably fail, decaying back into just the dirt without any ocean or sunshine, and we know it. It changes everything about what we do.
Fundamental #2: The purpose of life: Homeostasis
(I didn’t say the meaning of life.)
What do we do with this energy that takes so much of our lives gathering? Staying the same.
Yes, we spend the majority of our lives, even in the vaunted first world where we are so good at everything [saracasm], trying to stay at the right temperature, the right arousal (the sexy kind and the safety kind), and the right amount of water and food, and other unsexy things like salt balance. We are not self-improvement machines, we are self-maintaining machines, who, yes, have to improve when circumstances grow more inhospitable.
I’ve been wrestling with migraine recently and feel this deeply. Migraine triggers are basically anything a little bit outside of perfect homeostasis, so I essentially wear a shock collar that zaps all the blood vessels in my head the moment I get thirsty, cold, sleep-deprived, or anything else. (Though we all suck at this one… Put this down and go get some water!)
Special Human Wrinkle to this Fundamental fact #1: We are herd animals.
Our main project after ensuring our blood has the best salinity is maintaining membership in the herd. We are a social species, which means we mostly get all of these needs met through our group membership, not directly.
Arguably these days, we don’t have to worry about thirst or hunger directly if we maintain our place in our group. (Short of actually picking up a water bottle. Did you get some water? Go get some water.)
This means we spend almost all of the rest of our energy cooperating or building dominance and are constantly balancing between what we need, what our group needs, what the other groups have, and who is in our group.
Special Human Wrinkle #2: We don’t mature for a quarter-century.
The current accepted thought is that our brain is done cooking by the time we’re 25 years old. That is crazy when you think about all the threats to it.
It’s a huge drain on our collective energy stores, those with and without kids. Though obviously, it’s the hardest on parents to launch the next generation, especially because in the vaunted first world we treat it as an individual project.
It informs so much of what we do, takes so much of our energy, and informs so much of our policy and our world.
Special Human Wrinkle #3: We have way more than we need.
The most special part of being human: we have leftovers!
I’m not even kidding. In the animal kingdom, scavengers and dung beetles take care of the excess, but the rest of the ecosystem lives really close to the edge, finding extra energy just in time. We are the only ones who have figured out how to store vast amounts of dirt and sunshine and water for our use whenever we want it.
Don’t get me wrong, it still takes most of our lives to maintain complexity and homeostasis, our spot in our group, and spend a quarter of our lives launching the next generation…
But what do we do with the extra?
That’s the biggest existential question.
I write these postcards. (This is not a newsletter. If I ever break any news…. you’ll have your signal that a great deal of our civic institutions is in serious trouble.)
Or we write symphonies. Run the fastest. Swing a bat at a ball. None of our hobbies violate the first two rules, but one of the miracles of humanity is that we manage to grab hold of extra energy beyond what we need for right now and we do genuinely spectacular things with it.
And it’s also I’d say the Achilles heel of humanity as we eat everything in sight.
What isn’t in one of these boxes?
I’m not going to try to sum up all of civilization in one postcard, usually, but this is a big place to start. Our laws, entertainment, technology, communication, schools, military, law enforcement, marriages, water treatment plants, religion, and spa retreats with little circles of cucumbers – everything can fit into these boxes like Russian nesting dolls of reality.
Okay, maybe not the cucumber water. That is totally irrational and has no function on earth, contributes nothing to our survival, does not help us raise our young, maintain our group, or have any redeemable value. I am not biased. That is an objective fact.