My journey for the truth: a somewhat unremarkable story

[Diana]

I think we expect too much from this life.  Maybe it's because we have such and easy time as compared to a few hundred years ago.  Having a life of leisure has made us slow witted and lazy.  Having too much time on our hands for recreational pursuits can cripple the natural state of survival.

Most people simply exist and have forgotten what it was like when we needed to fight to survive day-to-day or year-to-year.  Man has spent an eternity struggling to survive by attempting to control his environment: shelter, heat and food.  Through evolution, we have managed to gain control of most of our lives by balancing our existence within the constraints of a sociological machine with defined parameters or "norms" from which we cooperatively work to exist.

This nice little balancing act allows us to complain about the price of milk or the fact that our coffee is too hot.  Reality is much more difficult and I wonder about the survival of most of society if something truly bad happened.  Many of the people I work with couldn't walk home if their lives depended on it.

Jus' sayin'...

There are a few other considerations:

1. The oldest parts of the human brain run on instinct and reaction to the environment. There is the idea of energy conservation and the principal of least action, which affect animal behavior. Animals save energy for fight-or-flight; they do the least—expend the least energy—while going through life in order to survive. So we as animals are wired for energy conservation to begin with.

2. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Until the lower needs—food, shelter, safety, and then relationships—are met, it is difficult for an individual to concentrate on the higher needs such as accomplishment and self-actualization, because there is so much daily pressure from just trying to survive. So while in survival mode, energy conservation would be the instinctive reaction. To put this in another context, when one is depressed, and one doesn't know if surviving is possible or wanted, one becomes "paralyzed" and does nothing at all. 

3. Modern-day people are bombarded by media continually. Media anesthetizes and brainwashes. The pressure from Hollywood (to be young, beautiful, rich) and newstainment (keeping fear alive; grabbing attention for senseless things), and the chaos on the Internet with every distraction possible while sitting in a chair, all add up to a disastrous recipe for keeping the mind in survival mode, while also satisfying vicariously higher needs such as accomplishments. One can vicariously enjoy the sensation of accomplishment while watching an athlete score a goal, or some 4-year-old who can play a concerto, or those contest programs where people compete with dancing/singing, without actually doing anything at all.

The masses are responding to outside prompts, and in general, not creating their own lives. The first thing is to unplug from the media. But the digital world makes that really hard for most people. I feel most people are more asleep than ever, thinking thoughts put in their heads by media. People these days "know" more because of exponentially greater access to information via digital means, which I think skews the picture. 

It is paradoxical that the world wide web has both introduced the idea of connectedness to the masses and separated people at the same time. And, because more information is available—whether it be true, false, nonsense, exaggeration, or fact—it paradoxically reveals catalyst, while validating the mindset not ready to deal with the catalyst.

In addition, we continue to create barriers between us and nature. This allows a great disconnect to the wholeness of existence. Sitting in a chair watching TV or surfing the Internet, or texting someone else while standing next to a friend who is also texting someone else, creates a wall between self and this world of diverse life (and again, paradoxically from each other), allowing us to mistreat this planet and all the life upon it because we aren't connected with the heart, just with a device.