You knew flying, plastic, etc were too good to be true. You didn’t earn them.
It’s nice to think of how lovely flying and plastic are, so convenient and amazing, especially if you ignore the parts you don’t like.
Both are recent inventions, along with countless others. Humans lived without them for hundreds of thousands of years. Why didn’t people develop them before? Because they weren’t smart enough? No, our ancestors’ brains a few hundred thousand years ago were like ours.
We wouldn’t have them without our cleverness and intelligence. But what happened a century or so ago that enabled these inventions if not new intelligence?
Fossil fuels happened. We didn’t earn or create them. We found them and are spending them like a spoiled kid with a trust fund.
Not just we, though. If you fly or buy things in plastic, you didn’t earn it. You know flying and plastic are too good to be true: flying, and disposable stuff ruin our world. You know you’re using more than you deserve or can process. We can all lay off how much we’re using. More importantly, all this stuff we didn’t earn gives us less satisfaction and life values than we expect.
As a society, how can we say we’re anything other than sick? I’m not saying there isn’t a lot healthy about us, but we’re abusing the system of life sustaining us. As we all know, we can’t keep up the pattern much longer. The Earth provides all we need if we stop demanding so much of it and pushing it beyond what it can sustain.
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