A Return to Normalcy

I watched this intriguing web series on vbs.tv about this man living out on the fringes of the arctic with his wife. He is hundreds and hundreds of miles from civilization, and of course, enjoys being as such. This man embraces the natural beauty that has been granted to us and thus lives off the land and the animals.

I had an epiphany of sorts while watching this... Why do we as men/women divulge ourselves in so much of our technological wonders? If you truly think about it, as we advance more and more in technology, it is only doing us more harm than anything else. Granted, fine, there has been advances in medicine that allow us so much more freedom and life. In reality though, is all of this really necessary? Wouldn't we be perfect content without all of this and living in an almost ignorant bliss?

Human civilization as a whole has only really been around for a blink of an eye. If you were to say that the entirety of earth's existence lay in one calendar year, our human existence has only been around for maybe the last minute before hitting the next year. In perspective, that is absolutely nothing compared to the whole of earth's life span to date. I guess the point I am trying to get at in this manner is we really don't matter do we? In the long run, our existence is merely a speck upon the spectrum that is the earth's life. Now, let's take that minute of human existence and divide it into parts. The twentieth century, or this last speck of technological marvels, is probably significantly less than a millisecond of that minute.

These tens of thousands of years of human evolution is really only a minute on earth's life span. We all know that is nothing. More importantly though is our evolution from a simple neanderthal to our current status as a homo sapien. As we evolved, obviously our structures have changed as well as our capabilities. What I mean by this is that, since our earliest conception as a homo sapien, our bodies and our structures have not quite changed significantly. What has changed significantly, on the other hand, is our lifestyles.

Put it this way, for the most part, we are genetically and biologically more accustomed to a life style of a hunter gatherer (perhaps even minor subsistence farming). Some may like to put it as a "caveman." What have we saturated ourselves with in this modern time?? We have way too much artificial crap that we insert into our bodies, stresses that should not even exist, no constant source of exercise, and the list continues. We as a civilization are so tied to our devices and our modern pleasures that we as a civilization have fallen far from our original ancestors and our natural being. I for one am not exempt from said situation... I enjoy all these modern pleasures and most definitely cannot live without it...

I am not proposing that we ditch all of our modern pleasures for we all know that this is impossible. What I am merely stating is that, in a way, these advantages of modernity are in a way pulling us away from our inner humanity. In fact, life would be so much simpler without all of that. The almost dire apocalyptic like situation we are in during these current times would have been completely avoided... Though, clearly.. it appears that progression is seemingly inevitable... Another question that begets a question....