Codependence vs. coexistence

Question from the Internet:

“What’s the difference between codependence and coexistence?”

Codependence is our actual existential state, but it does not necessarily lead to successful and sustainable coexistence.

We can look at our world right now.

We exist in a globally integrated and codependent system, where each individual depends on the whole system even for day-to-day survival.

But it does not mean we can coexist. Driven by our inherently egocentric, subjective, and individualistic nature, we want to exist at each other’s expense even when we already know we are codependent.

Just look at how people and nations behaved through the pandemic, and look at how we deal with climate change and all other global problems that already threaten our existence in a practical way.

It seems that we simply can’t overcome our self-serving, self-justifying, and exploitative instincts and urges like addicts that cannot stop their addiction even if costs their life.

In order to escape our seemingly inevitable fate of imminent self-destruction — in this or in the next generation — we need a special, purposeful, and highly practical method. This method needs to help us understand and actually and viscerally feel how much we are interdependent, and how much we are all but single and individual cells of the same living organism.

Without this very tangible and visceral sense of belonging to the same, single living being and knowing without any doubts that anybody’s individual survival is intricately and irrevocably intertwined with the health and survival of the whole, we will need terrible blows and intolerable suffering to teach us that our natural codependence has to lead us to conscious, mutually responsible and mutually complementing coexistence.