Can we scale our life down to natural necessities/available resources?

Question from the Internet:

“What would happen if everyone only bought what they absolutely needed?”

I agree with you that our present lifestyle that is based on excessive overconsumption, creating individual and collective “footprints” that are way beyond natural is literally killings us as we destroy the planet and each other.

So living a lifestyle where each consumes only what their natural necessity is would be ideal.

But there are quite a few problems with it.

Present human society, our whole life is built on consumption, ruthless competition, success at the expense of others, and Nature for accumulating profit and resources for the self.

We define ourselves through our work, through our material possessions, through our wealth and power over each other. We worship the rich and famous, the all-powerful regardless of how they became what they become, these people became the new “gods” examples to follow.

We could sharply observe through the recurring quarantine periods how people lost their general purpose, appetite for life as we lost access to the usual consumer activities, circus and bread entertainment we took for granted and we could not fill the void.

Returning to a lifestyle within the optimal parameters of natural necessities/available resources would create mass unemployment — although the same thing will inevitably unfold when our unsustainable system collapses anyway.

Another problem is that we do not even know what our true natural necessities are, what truly available resources are since we are completely incompatible with Nature’s system, we only scratch the surface with our “sciences”, “knowledge”, grasping some very superficial information, the knowledge we use for a simple, consumeristic, selfish day-to-day existence.

On the other hand, since we exist on Nature’s lawful, finely balanced and governed, fully integrated and interdependent system as one of Nature’s species, our present, artificial human system cannot be sustained, and will inevitably collapse sooner or later. Thus with or without or consent, we will scale down to the optimal parameters of natural necessities/available resources.

The question is if we do so as a result of perpetual crisis, inevitable wars, socioeconomic collapse, terrible loss of life, intolerable suffering making us change, or we consciously, proactively start changing ourselves and achieve adaptation to, compatibility with nature on our own account?

Through the right, purposeful, and practical “Integral Education” we can learn about our truly Human purpose in life — as determined by Nature’s evolution — we can learn what our true natural necessities and our available resources are so we can adopt the necessary lifestyle.

While from our present viewpoint this looks like terrible concessions, a terrible loss, when we get there we will realize that by accepting this new, Natural lifestyle we elevate ourselves to a qualitatively much higher, collective Human existence with a sense of life that is beyond all the inherently egocentric, subjective limitations of today, even beyond time and space which coordinates relate only to the subjective, self-serving, self-justifying ego.