The world it seems has come a full circle.
It’s like we are in the last Yuga according to the Hindu cosmic cycle, after which everything is going to begin again.
Never before have we stopped and looked back, as feverishly as we do now.
And why shouldn’t we? It’s a matter of life and death.
The world seems to crumble down from all sides. Where should you focus?
The renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari outlined 3 major causes- nuclear war, climate change and Artificial intelligence.
The world it seems has lost its nerve upon us. And we are worried about all there is in the news. Never before have we been such ardent devotees of the news headlines, because we never know where it might lead to. Where was the latest destruction and how soon will it reach us?
That is when we stopped being optimistic about the future.
We rather started to cocoon in the past.
The political leaders of the world are the first to acknowledge this. That is why they have turned their backs to the problems of the future and rather moved their attention at home. Nationalism is the new global agenda. ‘Our nation’, first, and let the others die out. All this, when the very impacts of globalized world-leading economies have created all the problems in the first place.
Therefore, the easiest way to live today is to talk about ‘your people’, ‘your religion’, ‘your area’, ‘your biodiversity’ and hence being a patriot as if that is going to solve the major problems looming over us.
Let’s turn to those who are trying to find solutions to environmental problems. Surprisingly, they too have found its solution backwards. The root cause of environmental degradation is our greed for having it all, without giving it back to nature.
Finally, we realized that this ‘Biosphere’ (K. Milton) existence is no longer helping us persists, rather it has led to the destruction of ecosystems worldwide. Therefore, the best bet is to try to be sustainable and turn inwards such that we become what Milton calls “ecosystem people“. That is when we rely on what grows local and not global. And if possible, start becoming self-reliant in growing veggies and fruits in your yard.
Aren’t we sounding like the primitive people who ate whatever their local environment provided?
Speaking of primitive people, we have been calling them names because they weren’t civilized or tech freaks like us. Their treasure full of knowledge was long forgotten, ignored except by a few social scientists who became their voice.
When the ocean full of technologies is rather draining the very oceans, we are again turning towards the forgotten knowledge of these people.
The way they lived with nature and had more knowledge than each of us individually possess. If we try to be honest with ourselves, we have little ‘real’ knowledge apart from what the internet allows us to know. Keep the technology aside and ask yourself simple questions and definitions and you will find amazed at your inability to answer them despite their simplicity.
If we get lost in the forest, with no technology whatsoever, we will likely perish since we have no knowledge of the real world. The larger the pool of knowledge we possess, the more we find ourselves hollow, swimming on the surface level.
We have developed complex languages but we find our expressions incomplete without motifs, Gifs and smileys. Inside us is that primitive man who drew ancient hieroglyphics and Sumerian codes.
We have that urge to be with nature, be it by planting trees and plants uprooted from their natural environment just for us to decorate our homes. Since we are not going back to the jungle, we might as well bring the jungle in.
That is when I say, we are turning back because the unbearable present and unpredictable future give us only the past to nest back in.
But the big question is, do we have a choice?
Cocooned in Curiosity 