One Apple A Day #252
“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.” — from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
This sentence has been troubled me since I read it a few days ago. The author had just explained how the Agricultural Revolution was substantially a hoax. We, as Homo Sapiens, traded a better life for an easier one that never came. As a result, we found much hardship.
We’ve been tricked by nature itself. For nature “the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA”, and the Agricultural Revolution did exactly that. We became able to “keep more people alive under worse conditions”.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a lack of judgement by our ancestors. We love to think that we are the last product of evolution, the smartest of a long sequence of improvements. We definitely won’t make a similar error, we won’t let nature trick us. We are in control. But, are we?
Aren’t we the same smart humans who keep telling ourselves that thanks to the mobile technologies we are going to work less and be happier? Yet, It looks like we are more stressed than ever.
The ability to communicate was a luxury only 100 years ago. Before the telephone, a person has to write a letter and wait days or weeks to get an answer. To communicate requires some effort, we people used to think about what the message they want to send. Nowadays communication is so easy and quick that we are snowed by messages. At the point that the media is often more important than the content. We are so busy communicating that we don’t have the time to reflect on what we are saying. Even less about what we are receiving.
Communication was a luxury, we made it a necessity, and now it feels like an obligation. I’m not sure we are so smarter.