We as a species, are bad at self-moderation. When rich, abundant resources are placed in front of us, whether it is a buffet table full of unhealthy food or a wild forest teeming with exotic wildlife — we simply take.
We take, and either we don’t care to think about the repercussions, or we know them anyway, but it does not change the way we act.
I am guilty of this myself. Be it in my personal life where I struggle to eat a conscious diet or simply by educating myself on what is happening with the world at large — I live in denial.
I have loved nature and animals my entire life, there are no words which can adequately describe why and how I fell in love with them. I simply do, but I have come to question myself in recent times, is my love for them an intellectual idea, or do I genuinely love them from the core of my soul, like how a parent would love a child?
I found out the answer very recently, when my tears fell uncontrollably, looking at a picture of a lioness. And here I am, with my tears falling uncontrollably again, as I struggle to find the right words in my mind to express a coherent thought while experiencing an unexplainable grief.
My heart breaks into a million pieces each time I come across something like that, but I carry on living in conscious denial without giving much thought to the things I consume or the efforts I choose to invest in.
If I cannot even consciously moderate myself on a personal level, what chances do I have to even try to convince the rest of the world that we have to revolutionize the way we live now, or face a future where our children will essentially live on as Wall-Es?
I don’t have an answer. I know all our effort, lobbying and campaigns will have limited impact unless we can change the way we think and more importantly, change the way our children think. There is no point applying band-aids when the brain is hemorrhaging. The rate of healing is so minimal compared to the rate of injury that it feels like a joke.
We as a species, have somehow evolved into this state where we have limited empathy for ourselves, much less for other people. If we cannot even possess reasonable empathy for our own kind, there is not much hope in trying to instill empathy for the rest of the species we actually share the world with.
Previously I would wait for myself to have enough bulk in my writing before I would publish a piece, but I want to change the way I approach writing. I want to see it as thought-forms in iteration, just like how we would commit a piece of code, open-source it and hope people can collaborate to make it better. My intention is not to prove that I am capable of reasoning and argument. It is to prove that I am not afraid to express my ideas and be bettered or be proven wrong. This is the way I think the human race should move forward — we should not be a species seeking dominance — why do we need to dominate if we are intelligent and secure? Collaborative betterment seems obvious to me, for both ourselves and other entities we share this world with.
Originally published on Medium