The world is so vast and diverse; it constantly changes before my eyes as the lens in which I view ‘the world’ broadens with everything I learn and experience. The world is beautiful – full of extraordinary places that I dream of visiting someday. It is also cruel, but only because as humans we make it so. I distinguish the natural world and the constructed world we call civilization, communities, and society separately. It’s amazing how we often take more value in our built environments even though everything we use comes directly from resources of the natural environment. I think that’s a mentality that needs to change. If you really think about it, laws, facts (although well supported), religion, social expectations…they are all human inventions based on what we as humans have constructed as ‘logic’. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this human sense of ‘logic’ is always right – it merely is the one sensical thing that we base much of what we know on. Knowing that what we see to be ‘proper’ or ‘right’ is merely one lens in viewing the world, I think it’s crucial to understand that lens change and so do mentalities. Nothing is static in this world of ours, natural or constructed.

We are terribly flawed. I like to think of three human traits when I think of humanity (not all necessarily bad).

Humans are selfish. I believe that there is no such thing as a selfless act, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We are all selfish and no matter the choice or action, there is always a tiny part of us that is driven by that selfishness. whether it’d be the good feeling one gets in helping others or sacrificing oneself to save a loved one, there is a selfish portion of ourselves that wants something to be a certain way.

Humans strive for ‘happiness’. I don’t know if there’s a person out there who doesn’t want to be happy, no matter what kind of happiness they wish for. More often than not, what a person defines as their own ‘happiness’ (ie. money and fame as general examples) means putting down the happiness of others around them. This pursuit of happiness links to our natural selfish desire to put ourselves first a lot of the time as well.

Humans are often full of themselves. Many of us are hypocrites by saying we’re not. The ‘meaning of life’, ‘destiny’, taking all of the resources we want and putting our constructed environments before the rest of the natural world – I see all of these as points of arrogance for humanity. Who decided to proclaim that humans are better than any other living organism on the planet? Our intelligence? Again, what makes our line of logic ‘right’? It’s just another way we make sense of the world. Everyone at one time or another yearns to know ‘why they are here’, as if there is some sort of logical reason for life and our very existence. Is it wrong of me to think that this kind of logic is arrogant?  I just see it as trying to narrow the world into our narrow lens of ‘logic’. Is it so incomprehensible to believe that we aren’t special – that we weren’t put on this planet for a purpose? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with believing that sort of thing – even I wonder about it sometimes. It’s only human to try to make sense of things in the only way we know how. But I just see it as us being full of ourselves by believing we can make sense of everything there is to know and believing that to be ‘right’. I will state that the qualities of intelligence and curiosity in humans has been beneficial to our kind immensely. It’s how we’ve come this far in our entire history. I just don’t like the hierarchal idea that humans are the highest life forms in the world and that everything else on the planet is free for us to label and use.

In the end, it isn’t our job to put tailor the world to our liking. Rather, we have to imagine and create ingenious ways to shaping ourselves to the world in which we live in a sustainable manner.