Your Life Online Is Satisfying, but It’s Not Really Real

You feel and think, online, but are your senses awakened?

Human language is very abstract. Add a layer of symbols that represent thoughts, and it’s more removed. Add a layer of electrical signals to it, and it’s even further from our animal origins. Add yet another layer of our social filters, confirmation bias, technical adaptations and tinkering and we’re actually getting closer to being cyborgs than animals.

We evolved, (Sapiens) for more than two hundred thousand years immersed in a world of senses. We lived and ate in the forests, and grasslands. We knew our prey. We tasted their pain, and matched their migrations. We felt the cold, or heat. We spoke face to face. We had forty-two or more senses more attuned to a few other animals super powers like echo-location, magnetism, light, radiation, and proprioception.

Because we moved and interacted, our senses were more attuned to our social needs. In modern times, we just leave confusing and sometimes hostile notes that do not show the time and sensitivity that cave art shows. We knew where the threads and bone needles of our clothes originated.

This reciprocity creates a type of gratitude and social bond.

A supreme ruling?

As the Supreme Court moves to remove protections from people and ecosystems, and instead award protections to industry, we have to reexamine how we consume the hours of our day.

Living online is a way to live, (often to escape) and virtual connection has its uses, but our removal from green spaces and food procurement changed everything. Knowing our food on a personal basis, and being responsible for raising, killing, sharing, and disposing of animals without so much waste, was once the norm.

We changed all of that by adding fossil fuels to every aspect of our lives from mobility in commerce and employment, to intensive use of destructive farm methods to raise both grain and livestock.

While we were ‘successfully’ clearing the fields and forests, we also burgeoned to over eight billion people.

It was also normal for people to get more exercise, breathe less toxins, share among a community, and together work out problems that come up.

A future for moral food

Should we just drive onward with the coming plagues (most virus and many pathogens are zoonotic), crash the population, and then the scattered survivors can go back to the farm?

No.

Clearly, it’s too late for that. Technology, and advanced engineering, including genetic modification of food, and even lab created meat, will arrive sooner or later. And although we should all live in vertical, garden buildings, we have far to go.

So long as we give in to our lethal oil and gas addiction, we lose time and place. But, there are collaborative alternatives.

Our biggest challenge — and reward — is to reconnect to the sustainable world that made us. To reexamine our moral belonging. We can actually employ technology to help with this.

“Immoral meat” is like toxic masculinity. It’s not the only kind there is. An adjective that doesn’t guide us toward better habits is not necessarily a good adjective. More likely, we don’t like what we hear.

Yet, we do have to peer more critically into truth. We have to confront every form of injustice, greed, pollution, deforestation, inequality, and our own contributions that support such systems.

Oh. And, almost as an after-thought, did you know our present way of producing meat from animals is hideously cruel, inhumane, and so hard to face, that it takes great courage, fortitude and determination to even consider a change?

To be a better person, review your own responsibility to your Earthly tribe. Hate yourself less.

Greta Thunberg said, “Change is coming whether you like it or not.”

It’s nudging that change into something we can be proud of that is crucial.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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