What is the ideal of human existence?
The basis of a good life is the same for all of us on the planet. The six essentials are:
- clean air
- pure water
- healthful food
- safe shelter
- harmonious relationships
- purposeful activity
Improving these six will favorably affect any person’s life. Social progress at the expense of the essential elements is not only risky, but it’s also stupid. Quality at the elementary level is the basis of personal fulfillment, integrity, and satisfaction at all other levels, such as work, art, science, leisure, etc.
Why be poor, when you can hope to be rich?
Frank Lloyd Wright said it so well: “Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.”
Give people a choice between a very simple life with the above six essentials guaranteed, and a mere prospect of a rich life without the above guarantee, and most will go for the later. But how many do actually achieve the luxuries? And does luxury equate happiness?
Millions of poor forsake a simple life and head for the promise in the city, ending up with a stressful minimum wage job renting a moldy flat close to a highway, or even worse, ending up homeless.
Democratic constitutions promise the citizens a safe and healthy living environment. So, in theory, your constitution guarantees you the six essentials of a good life. But does it really? How clean is the urban air? What’s the food like? And how affordable is decent housing?
Going to a large city is a gamble. Only a few become millionaires, often by putting themselves through immense physical, mental, and moral pains. They have to play dirty, maneuvering in gray waters of financial speculation, hoarding more than they’ve deserved.
The rest are forced to work hard. If they’re a little lucky with their initial standing (ethnicity, creed, family background, connections, wit, etc.), they’ll secure their place in the middle class. If not, they’ll work even harder for sheer survival. Those born in the city will inherit their family standings and they may move some steps up or down the social ladder, but extreme shifts remain rare.
There’s a lot of promise in the city, but once you buy the lottery ticket for this promise, you have to keep buying more tickets — whether you’re winning or losing. Once you get used to the inherent cost of participation in the system, you accept it as your only choice. There’s no way out.
The power of context
I’m drawing this picture to illustrate the power of social context as it limits your choices. The social context in our modern civilized lifestyle is an immense force. When trying to find solutions for global problems, we’re unable to think outside that box.
To understand why, let’s look at the last of the six essentials: purposeful activity.
What’s your purpose in life? What are you living for? What excites you? What are your ideals, passions, and aspirations?
Please, give these questions some thought before you read on.
I bet you haven’t thought of optimizing how you meet your basic needs. Or have you?
Have you considered your air, water, food, shelter, etc.? Or do you think they’re not in the domain of the life’s purpose? Maybe you even think there’s nothing you can do about them?
I bet you’re thinking about your purpose within your social framework. You can’t escape your context; even when you go to the remotest corner on Earth, the civilization is still with you, around you, and in you. Future generations will have to bear with an even more constraining context in the face of collapsing ecosystems and potentially social structures too.
But what do social constraints have to do with your individual purpose? Can’t you just choose to express it in whichever way you want?
Externalized purpose
Well, you can’t.
The pressure to fit inside the norms is horrendous. Your society doesn’t give you any other choice but to be part of purposes that are external to you and your natural environment. The society’s purpose is externalized and therefore your own too.
Today, the verb “to externalize” appears mostly in economy, meaning: “Fail or choose not to incorporate (costs) as part of a pricing structure, especially social and environmental costs resulting from a product’s manufacture and use. (quoted from Wikipedia)” Such is the norm in the economy and in that context, ethical businesses stand no chance.
In the same line of thought, to externalize purpose means to fail or choose not to align aims with essential needs at the cost of estrangement from one’s self, one’s community, and the natural environment.
The externalized purpose is the uniting feature of all major civilizations. You sacrifice your life in the pursuit of a “greater goal,” whatever that means in your cultural milieu. You can literally give your life in a war for your nation or in an evangelic mission to convert the faithless to your religion. Or you can give your life figuratively, by committing it to science, art, sport, health, career, or to simple acts of kindness. As long as you’re doing it within the civilization, the purpose of which is externalized, your own purpose will be externalized too.
The indigenous are not estranged from their tribe and their immediate natural environment. They don’t aspire for eternal bliss and they don’t fear eternal condemnation. Their deities are personifications of natural forces. After death, their bodies return to nature, and the living escort their spirit to an afterlife: reuniting with the ancestors, with the great spirit of nature, reincarnating, etc. The purpose of their present life is to nurture ties with the tribe and the environment, not to save themselves from the misery of this world and ascend to the blessed divine eternity.
I’m aware this is an oversimplification. I don’t idealize the life of the indigenous. It has its own agonies civilization found a solution for. My perspective is not “either, or”, but rather “hand in hand.”
By the way, to assess how estranged your culture is, look at what it does with the dead. Are bodies and souls forever removed from nature or do they go back to nature after death?
What is the dominant story about your fate after you die? Does the story of the afterlife affect your purpose in this life?
Now forgive me for my inability to resist the temptation to quote Anthony De Mello at this point. It’s one of my favorite passages and it’s so relevant here:
“Many think the most important question in the world is: ‘Does God exist?’ Wrong!
“Many think it is: ‘Is there a life after death?’ Wrong!
“Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of: Is there a life before death?
“Yet my experience is that it’s precisely the ones who don’t know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life. One sign that you’re awakened is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life. You’re not bothered about it; you don’t care. You are not interested, period.”
And now back to the indigenous. For the most part, their purpose is internalized. After death, they release their bodies and souls back to nature. While they’re living, they move with the seasons, with the rhythms of nature. They take the most out of life’s essentials. It’s a very simple and very rich life.
Civilized people, on the other hand, live for something external from their selves and their environment. They’re estranged from their tribes and their natural environment. Their purpose is based on social constructs. They can choose to pursue happiness by aiming at riches, success, power, leisure, mastery in some skill, knowledge, charity, eternal afterlife … On the outside, their life seems very abundant, but on the inside, they often feel miserable.
Living a good, simple life just for the sake of living, is not considered much of a purpose in Western culture. You could easily be accused of being an irresponsible freeloader!
You may say: “Ok, then let me out of the civilization! I don’t want to be seen as a parasite. All I want is a simple life in a cottage in the woods. I take full responsibility for my life and death.”
There’s no way you can do that!
There’s a tax for the land you occupy, the rain you harvest, the exchanges of goods with your neighbors. You’re not allowed to be just a human, without also being a legal entity with a birth certificate and tax number.
The unstoppable momentum of externalization
It’s impossible to stand in the way of civilization as gigantic as ours. Nobody can stop it.
The civilization tames and subdues nature to serve its pursuit of externalized goals. Nature has no value in and of itself. A human individual has no value in and of herself.
You have no value in and of yourself!
Oppression is institutionalized and the regulation of oppression too.
If you want to reason the giant out of his insane actions, you have to address him in his language. That language has no words for what he ought to hear. Even if there were, he doesn’t have the capacity to understand them. It’s like asking a member of a dogmatic cult to use common sense.
All civilizations were initiated by cults that externalized purpose. The 21st-century global civilization is the most dreadful phase of any cult so far. There’s nothing as estranging as the cult of consumerism.
Is there anything you can do?
The ideal of human existence
You can improve your life by making sure the essentials are never compromised. You can resist shiny toys and the quest for more. You can drop the unnecessary necessities and bring your attention to the internal purpose and align with nature. You can reclaim your soul from the fearmongering spiritual tyrants.
You can open yourself to the simple joy of living. You don’t need to do anything to be joyful. When joy is absent, that’s the sign of interference or obstacle. Tangible interferences in the form of the lack of water, food, health, touch, freedom, love, etc. cause distress and misery, but that’s relatively easy to solve.
Much worse are the imaginary lacks. If you’re accustomed to earning 10 million dollars a year, you’ll feel the lack when you earn “only” 1 million.
Take care of the essentials! Go on a walk, and joy should be there whether you’re rich or poor. To become richer you don’t need more stuff. Instead of wasting your energy on accumulating more, invest it in enhancing your capacity of enjoyment and lowering the threshold of satisfaction. When you do that even tiny experiences will be abundant.
Petty people highly condition their joy, so their “basic needs” include much more than they really need. The simplest way to enhance joy is to simplify the fulfillment of your needs. That should be the key function of science and technology, not all the complication that’s imposed on you.
Duško Radović put it so well: “You need little to have a life. To have a miserable life, you need a lot more.”
The ideal of human existence is actually so simple, it’s difficult to describe it in the language of the giant that I’m using here in this text because that’s the norm we all depend on. The key element is internalizing purpose and I can only hope you understand what I mean by this. If everyone did it, that would solve all the world’s problems.
We’d neutralize the illusion of consumerism without any fight. There’s no need to destroy and retaliate for the harm done thus far. There’s no need to reform and correct. We wouldn’t need to interfere with what’s going on out there. We’d be lying in the sun naked with a flower in our hair and humming our favorite melody. That’s it!
As it says it the Talmud: “Live well. It is the greatest revenge.”
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This is my fourth article in the series. You can read each article individually, but to make the most out of it read them all from the beginning, starting from:
1. The Ultimate Test of Your Spiritual Development
2. The Ultimate Test of Your Awareness
3. Why self-change is so hard and how to still do it?
…
My next article will be about three layers of knowledge: innate, technical, and moral. Understanding their characteristics, you’ll be able to resist the externalization of your purpose, take control of self-change, self-reflection, and self-awareness, and move further towards transcending self-referentiality — relying on your ancient indigenous roots and the fine wisdom of your civilization.