Where Did All The Good Ideas Go?
Is it just me or has the world gone to shit? Nothing long-lasting seems to be happening. Everything is bits and pieces, half-hatched, quick turnaround time, last-minute collage of an idea and nothing is ever given time to grow into what it needs to become. What it could become and take shape into.
Who has the time?
The punchline is that all good things take time. The very timely, as ever. “Rome was not built in a day” comes to mind. But even Rome was built with an urgency of a few hundred years.
We have the technology and the tools to think long-term, much longer than a few hundred years. Not to say the Romans didn’t and when in Rome we must do what the Romans do but we are not in Rome, anymore. I wonder if the Large Hadron collider at CERN and the likes would be the legacy of our times? Have we made it? As a species? Or is there work yet to be done?
Before we can even get to the discussion of making things last, there’s a poignant and nearly crippling question of what exactly is it that we’d like to make? That discussion would certainly bleed into the topic of identity. The collective identity of humanity has grown a million heads. A million voices vying for a million different tiny agendas and they keep us busy and they keep us going. But we also seem to be chasing our tails, running around in circles like rabid dogs. Where is this all leading up to?
Few have the forethought to even stop to ask the question.
This is bad news for humanity. Humans thrive on unlocking their potential and unfurling their genius but we are hell-bent on binding humanity by one form of drug or another. This is not enhancing our life, quite the opposite. But then are people even noticing that they’re on a slow boil and the temperature only goes up? Are they realizing that enhancing life is an option that humanity has? We are too loyal to our misery. To our torture. To our servitude.
Humans could be autonomous, free-thinking individuals. But that’s not what culture raises them to be. ‘Raising’ in itself is a cattle analogy. Humans are cultivated like mindsets are cultivated. We must consciously step away from such ideas of servitude and move into a more autonomous society. That’s the only way we can keep everyone’s interests alive.
Otherwise, it’s a slow painful death for everyone across the globe, with how interconnected and interdependent we seem to have become. Coronavirus could not have been a better symbol bringing right into focus how joint at the hip we all really are. So we can stop pretending to be otherwise.
But it was quite the precipitous decline during the pandemic, the decline of values, the decline of mental health, and the decline of good ideas. But even that, how many realize? What’s going on?
Just working like sheep will not ascend humanity to godlike status. But is that something the majority of humans alive today even think about?
There’s no clear direction and there’s no real direction to humanity at the moment and it shows in the amount of noise in culture and social media. A numbed life of constant escapism is easy to be hacked into and taken advantage of. Most humans who are aware of the fact, turn a blind eye as if we don’t have more significant problems to tackle. More pressing matters looming over the horizon, drawing closer by the day.
So this vicious cycle of numbing continues and nothing ever leaves a lasting impression. Everything is chopped up to bits. So no sane decisions ever get made. No sane discussions ever get exchanged. Not in legislation, not in politics, not in world organizations, not in free markets.
Chasing our own tail, aren’t we?
