Ayase Leilani's Blog

You won’t get much closer
Till you sacrifice it all
You won’t get to taste it
With your face against the wall
Get up and commit
Show the power trapped within
Do just what you want to
And now stand up and begin

~Muse - Panic Station

Vegan, vegetarian or omnivore?  Exercise vigorously or be a couch potato?  Eat at McDonald's​ or make a homemade salad?  Sugar or fat?  Meat or carbs?  Fruit or vegetable?  Healty or not?

Privacy or publicity?  Download the app that asks for permission from a bunch of stuff or don’t?  DuckDuckGo​ or Google​?  Twitter​ or Mastodon?  Siri or Alexa?

Left or right?  Libertarian or Socialist?  Trump or Hillary?  Democracy or Authoritarianism?

Good or bad?  Or neither…?

The truth is it’s all misleading.

Let’s be perfectly honest:  life in the modern world is toxic by nature.  And while you listen to the endless snake-oil schillers try to sell you on this fad or that fad, you’re being distracted from the reality:  humans are not living in a world where maintaining their health is possible.

Consider the fact that for millenia, humans were small-scale socieities; people lived in either tribal or nomadic groups.  These tended to stay very collected together and often never extended further out from their tiny little area of residence (or camp, if they were nomadic) with the exception of handfuls of alliances.  Thus, people didn’t really do much outside of move around, hunt, settle and/or take care of things back at base (which was either a camp or a settlement).  Much of this involved great physical labour or other sorts of strenuous physical activity.  The food eaten often was made up of the freshest kill along with whatever vegetation could be found in surrounding areas, making meals a mixture of vitamins, minerals, water and fructose.

This is how humans have lived for most of their existence on earth.  But then things began to change about two thousand years ago.

It all began with agrarianism; farming and growing food off the land allowed nomadic people to begin to expand further, along with being more in charge of what they could eat.  Then more and more inventions of technology came along; simple hunting tools got more complex, milling and fermenting tools were developed for the first time…and soon, humanity began to collect and form the prototypes for modern government (from Genghis Khan in the East to the Romans in the West).

And then came the expansion of global colonialism, which developed enough advanced technology to lead to the industrial revolution…

…Which led to enough technology to create the automated/service-based societal model we know today.

We no longer hunt for our food and in most cases, we don’t even grow our own food.  We work for people far above us every day…

…And go home to climate-controlled housing…

…While those who are not privileged enough live on the streets and have nothing to live off of at all.

Obviously, this means life today is nothing like life in the past where humans spent much of their existence.  Because of this, in the span of only about two thousand years, things went from very basic and small-scale to complex and stratified.  We went from doing everything in our power to be responsible for our individual survival to modern conveniences, comforts and automation (the best of which only came about in the last several hundred years).  This, of course, has vastly outpaced the capacity humans (or indeed, any species) have had to evolve physically.

Of course, this means the way we live is incompatible entirely with the way we used to live…and it can never go back to that way again.  Thus, we have to find ways to adapt to our life and the way we live in the modern world; our lifestyles are unhealthy, our food is unhealthy, our way of living amongst each other is unhealthy and even the way we look at politics is unhealthy (as I alluded to above, we can no longer exist solely as individuals but rather as individuals within a whole; this is a huge reason why I believe socialism is the only sustainable political model for the future).

But wait!!  That’s what you want to say, isn’t it?  And then you want to add comments about disease, obesity, health concerns, genetic ailments, privacy, liberty, freedom, personal success and other stuff, right?

Guess what?  Unhealthy and collectivist living is our future.  That is the future humanity chose when it chose this path of stratification, modernisation and convenience.  And that is the path we all must now pursue, because many of us cannot imagine life without what we have right now (and those of us who can–let’s admit it–know that humanity will never want to regress back to the way it was for millenia).

This means you get health care and fight for those who can’t access it due to bigotry and hatred.  This means that you get involved with making life better the more we allow technology and modernity to be one with our way of life.  This means you find a way to live.  And it means you face the political reality and begin to understand that we can’t all fend for ourselves any longer due to how things are structured in today’s world.

Therefore, please, please, PLEASE!!  If you are able, join the fight to ensure that the homeless, the marginalised, the underprivileged and those otherwise without a voice can have enough of the resources to get involved as well; we can no longer rely on bootstraps thinking or believing that we can all help ourselves by ourselves in today’s monstrous, modern world.

As for you, personally?  Yes, you can go ahead and get that Big Mac or Whopper.

Enjoy your technology and don’t get angry when privacy concerns come to the forefront; we are learning and growing and so is all the technology we use every day.

Be politically involved and stay educated so you know what’s happening out there.  And thank gods you’re privileged enough to have access to all of this while having a job (if you–indeed–want one or can have one) and living in your apartment or house.

Educate yourself.  Experiment and figure out what works for you, because we live in a world where we can no longer do anything but try to find ways to entertrain ourselves and make ourselves more and more intelligent so we can all work together.  And realise that this is all we can possibly hope to do in today’s modern world.