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When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and
by wayoverthecloud 2y ago
When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human.
For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems even when there's a simple solution. I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee
in the first place.
Sometimes we should just trust nature to do it's work. This article was a refreshing read.
- therein 2y agoI don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26
- exe34 2y agothe heavenly step-dad doesn't care when they die of starvation either.
- fire_lake 2y agoA systematic study of birds would find that many do indeed starve to death.
- lm28469 2y agoIs the goal of humanity to replicate infinitely and love as long as possible regardless of anything else ? Because that's what cancers do and it never end well for the host
- dukeyukey 2y agoTo a point, yes. That's the goal of practically any living thing, including cancer.
- lm28469 2y agoWe're supposedly smart monkey who can project in the future and act accordingly.
- lukas099 2y agoI don't think anyone said or implied that
- mrguyorama 2y agoIn what way does cancer "love"?
- jonplackett 2y agoI do enjoy scientific debunkment of religious quotes. After the Notre Dam fire someone on Twitter was claiming a miracle because the golden (statues I think?) had survived. Someone then pointed out that the melting point of gold is several hundred degrees above the temperature of a wood fire.
- Y_Y 2y ago> melting point of gold is several hundred degrees above the temperature of a wood fire A grand miracle indeed
- graemep 2y agoSo do people - at least those lucky enough not to be part of a reasonably affluent industrial society. You do realise that metaphors are never perfect?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Modified3019 2y agoAnd quickly too, the small ones live on a metabolic knife edge and can go down in as little as two days. Here in the valley of Oregon, we don’t get snow often or for very long, but one late winter/early spring we suddenly got 1-2 feet snow cover for at least 3 days. I’ll never forget the few dozen birds I saw dead on the side of the roads because they couldn’t get to food.
- flakeoil 2y agoI'm curious, what does that quote really mean? I can attempt to draw a few conclusions, but I'm not quite sure of either and they can also almost be the opposite of each other.
- Dalewyn 2y agoYou have to bust your ass to live while the bird just lives freely with helpings from God, despite man supposedly being made in God's image and stuff. I think it's a misguided sentiment of its time, we know today that birds also bust ass in their own birdy ways to live. We all bust ass.
- maxbond 2y agoI don't know that I know what it means, but I'll tell you a thought it brought to mind. A while ago I was having a discussion, and someone asserted that synthetic fertilizers are necessary because composting doesn't scale. And my reaction was, surely composting scales to an entire biosphere - like, empirically we know this, right? There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber. Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom to create supply chains that can run as closed loops and accept inputs that aren't so rich and concentrated? I don't want to argue this point, there are definitely good counterarguments that could be made, but I'm just trying to illustrate the shift in perspective I think the commenter may have been going for rather than change the topic.
- Scarblac 2y agoThe argument doesn't quite work imo because farmers are actively working against the normal ecosystem - we don't want the normal plants to grow there, we want our desired crops. With enough production for us to feed the world and to give farmers a living wage. I still think it's doable (but not if we also want to feed many times our mass in lifestock), but it's not easy.
- hawski 2y agoFarmers also want to have a large swaths of a monoculture plant, because it is easy then to mechanize. That goes, as you say, against the normal ecosystem. Permaculture gardens look much different, but you can't easily mechanize that.
- crakenzak 2y ago[flagged]
- dukeyukey 2y agoWhy do you assume OP is even religious?
- xyst 2y ago[flagged]
- rvnx 2y agoNo, probably no Bible bots (though there are plenty of bots here, whose end goal is to collect karma to sell upvotes). However, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Trends and themes often resurface on Reddit, where discussions can cyclically return to religious topics or quotes.
- lukas099 2y agoWho pays for upvotes? Advertisers?
- MikeTheGreat 2y agoWhat is the reddit fallout that happened last year? (I don't follow or read reddit, unless a search for something specific leads me to a particular page, so I'm clueless about this and curious to know more)
- moritzruth 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
- lynx23 2y ago[flagged]
- graemep 2y agoThe reason is that there are huge amounts of religious texts, and what they record people's understanding of the world, grappling with the problems in their lives, and trying to make sense of their experiences: they are about being human. If you are open minded about/not hostile to religion (in general or a particular religion) you will find a lot of wisdom in religious works. Not just "scriptures" but a lot else, written from ancient times to contemporary.
- anal_reactor 2y ago[flagged]
- maxbond 2y agoGood luck with that. Try switching to audio. It'll let you close your eyes and properly recline. That's a lot of the battle right there. Something contentless like the sound of a waterfall is ideal, but if you can't do that for whatever reason, even something contentful like a podcast or audiobook is probably better then your phone screen.
- Der_Einzige 2y agohttps://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/147/220/bd8.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/147/220/bd8...
- anal_reactor 2y agoExactly why I want to save money and then FIRE
- figassis 2y agoWe invented technology and methods to make things that are meant to be difficult, easy (like food, transportation, mating, surviving). So now we have to invent more technology and methods to find an equilibrium for the system that we broke and barely understand, so we continue to break it and abstract away the instability, understanding it less and less. I mean, what is the purpose of the stock market? housing/mortgage market? An upvote? The cookie banner and ad tracking industry?
- NilMostChill 2y ago- Maintaining and increasing high level wealth, also Control - Control, also profit - Control, albeit in a less direct form than housing also data and profit - The pretense of caring about privacy issues, so politics and control - Profit/control If you ask, "why?" for almost anything in today's society it'll come down to money/power, which are functionally mostly the same thing. Exceptions exist sure, but they are called exceptions for a reason. My perspective at least, i'm sure others think differently.
- astrange 2y agoThe purpose of the stock market isn't "control". If you wanted control of something you owned you wouldn't be interested in selling it. This is why some fascists were opposed to capitalism, they thought corporate owners should be running them like kings and not selling it for money. It's to reduce risk by letting other people share in funding a venture.
- NilMostChill 2y agoAdmittedly the original intended purpose of the stock market might not have been control but that's certainly a big feature of it now. Unless you are already ultra wealthy there is little to gain from individuals entering the stock market directly. It's a vehicle for those with power and/or money to gain more power/money by siphoning it from everyone who isn't them. Sure, some people make money, in the same way people in a casino make money. The house, however, always wins.
- leobg 2y agoHad a very similar thought this morning. With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive. My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere. When you bought a roll of bread 40 years ago, you would be entering a shop owned by the baker. You would be getting a roll that was made by hand with local ingredients. And the woman at the counter would be friendly and relaxed, and she would be earning enough doing this simple job to have a normal family. Today, when I want to buy a roll, I enter a shop that heats up rolls that they get from an industrial scale bakery. It costs about 5 to 10 times as much. And the woman standing at the counter is of the lowest socioeconomic status, because the salary she gets for her work is barely enough to afford her some tiny apartment. I would be able to except that many things just don’t change, and every generation has its problems. But if we believe the mantra that progress in technology makes us happier and wealthier than those that came before, I think we’re kidding ourselves. That, to me, seems more and more like a modern form of organized religion. And I’m not sure who the priests are.
- soco 2y agoMaybe it's not about the things we have, but about the hope we have. You run away, you change, you survive things because you have hope in a better future. You even work to make a better future for your kids. You have hope. What hope have those people today?
- ffsm8 2y agoOr phrased differently: she struggled for her survival. It's a very physical one-off challenge that you can master (or not). That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking. None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten worse with every technological advance, and it'd expect it to get meaningfully worse with LLMs now, too. A select few will still get meaningfully richer, but - on average - their prospects for their future are a complete dumpster fire. You (leobg) are likely right that people a few hundred years ago probably wouldn't have become depressed like Gen Z, Alpha and likely soon Beta too... But they'd probably long since taken up their arms, wiping out a good chunk of the population and consequently redistributing wealth to the survivers. Do you honestly think that'd be better for us?
- ReptileMan 2y ago>it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. Humans actually utilize quite a big chunk of the biomass.
- HPsquared 2y agoIt depends how you count it, whether you include plants etc. Humans are only 0.01% of all biomass, but humans and livestock completely dominate the "mammals" category. Funnily enough, the livestock population weighs about twice as much as the human population.
- adrian_b 2y agoHumans and livestock completely dominate not only the "mammals" category, but the entire "terrestrial vertebrates" category. There are only a few other terrestrial animals of comparable biomass with humans, e.g. ants and termites.
- ambientenv 2y agoThere's some further thought-provoking discussion in a recent conversation with Daniel Scmachtenberger [1] talking about what you suggest. [1] Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment - https://youtu.be/tmusbHBKW84 https://youtu.be/tmusbHBKW84
- nunez 2y ago> I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee in the first place. This has come into hyper clarity for me ever since transitioning to minimalist shoes/sandals ten years ago and foregoing all caffeinated beverages this past December. It's actually quite insane to think about how accessible coffee is and how much of our modern economy relies on people consuming it. Consulting, big law, investment banks and lots of blue collar jobs (for example) rely on workers pulling 12+ hour days to do what mostly amounts to eye-watering amounts of paperwork. Given that sleep naturally becomes an afterthought when working under these conditions and showing any signs of weakness is frowned upon, coffee, sodas and energy drinks are all but required to function. Similar deal with shoes. Feet are incredibly complex systems that are designed to withstand lots of abuse. Unfortunately, big shoe companies built their fortunes off of selling shoes that are great for sports but terrible for everyday use. Instead of pushing more minimal shoes that counteract weakening feet while being simpler to make, they push orthotics and shoes with more advanced technology and thicker sole stack. It's depressing to think about, so I try not to!
- lumb63 2y ago+1 for minimalist footwear. I keep telling anyone who will listen, “isn’t it crazy that we don’t have foot shaped shoes?” And then we wonder why we have bunions, knee pain, and tight hips when we sit sedentary at a desk all day in our not-foot-shaped shoes. I highly recommend reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. It was written in the ‘60s about how technology influences the direction of humanity and all the unintended consequences that come from that, and how we turn to more technology to solve those problems. It was a very prescient book.
- gavmor 2y agoIn that vein, I highly recommend Katy Bowman's "Move Your DNA," and "Whole Body Barefoot." Bowman's biomechanical analysis of modern movement, furniture, and the built environment has changed the way I walk, sit, and carry things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]