What To Do With Ourselves

A short history

For most of human history, choosing how we wanted to live wasn’t much of an option. Simply staying alive imposed natural limits as did the absence of technologies beyond stone tools. Perhaps most importantly, everyone lived more or less the same way for thousands of generations.

With the advent of agriculture and civilization, populations grew. A small array of specialized jobs emerged. But choice was still curtailed by the singularity of culture and the dangers of breaking off and going solo.

Suddenly, there were many paths to take. Trains, planes, and automobiles could take us anywhere, where we could work at any job conceivable.

Still, the vast emotional instability of deviating from the people and culture we knew growing up kept us grasping for popular pursuits that seemed practical, safe, and widely accredited.

Today, the culture has become so fragmented and individualized, that it’s hard to know what to do next. Gone are the days of automatically following the footsteps of the family trade. Pursuing wealth and position has taken on a hollow ring. We find ourselves floating around in a universe we can never hope to understand, left alone to choose from options that are both delightfully endless and debilitatingly overwhelming.

I love our wide-open, highly specialized, hi-tech world where being a cartoonist of any beliefs is possible. But it comes with costs. Gone also are the days of automatic inclusion into unified groups where everyone naturally has each other’s back.

Luckily, group unity and individual choice aren’t mutually exclusive. No matter how different we become, we will always have far more in common than not. The personally and globally critical challenge before us now is how to reconnect.