Afterlife

I like debates.

They’re fun for me. I’m a strong, opinionated person who likes to use facts & logic to back up my claims. After all, my life’s mission statement is “the pursuit of information.” However, I also understand that the human condition is ruled by a lack of logic. We as humans are dominated by compulsion, by urges we cannot explain not reason with.

But I digress.

I have a friend who is an outspoken atheist & we sometimes have discussions about faith, as the idea of one having none confuses me & the idea that someone like me having lots boggles his mind. However, there is one thing that we agree on & that is that people are getting dumber.

We live in a society where we value our cell phone contract more than promises made to people we love. Where we care more about updating Facebook during a hurricane than whether we have food. Where we believe everything is replaceable so there is no point in fixing it. We’ll get a new phone, dog, lover, focus on the other sibling, parent. Nothing is worth saving.

We as humans have no survival instincts, no preservation skills. We keep Master Chief alive better than our pets. We wait outside in the rain for Black Ops 2 but can’t survive in a blackout. We campaign to keep our favourite TV couples together but we aren’t there for our best friends when their lives are coming apart. We care about “me” time, not helping others.

As our phones get smarter, we are turning into a race of selfish drones who honestly have no idea how to live outside of their parents’ basement. We need to find a way to start getting back in touch with the ideas that got humans this far in the first place:

– fight to survive, to make it work, to get through
– everyone takes care of each other, especially when there’s a disaster
– people not possessions
– when someone is at their lowest or weakest (& maybe their most annoying), embrace them, don’t push them away
– agree to disagree

Maybe those are just hippie ideals my pagan hippie friend preaches, but humans need to get back to basics. Disasters like Hurricane Sandy show is that people can come together, but also the selfishness of others (the outcry of people who couldn’t charge their phones with no regard to people starving). I assume it would be easy for aliens to take us over because we are just so weak!

So, maybe we should stop putting all of our intelligence into our electronics & focus on bettering ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we’ll become better people.