Why do people say that we live in an awful world?!

Question from the Internet:

“Why do so many people think the current state of the world is ‘awful’ when by almost every metric, our quality of life is better than at any point in history?”

You are right that many people live much better than even how kings used to live a few generations before us, and at least according to certain statistics, the number of people living in absolute poverty is decreasing — although this number might start to grow again as the developing crisis bites more.

The problem is that the insatiable and irrepressible human ego, with its ever-growing desire for more — which has been driving our development so far — also makes our quantitative growth and excessive overconsumption-based system act like cancer leading to its inevitable demise, as we can already foresee.

And fulfilling our basic necessities and creating a lifestyle when we try to consume way beyond those necessities is only half the story.

The more important half of the story is that fulfilling our basic necessities and acquiring every possible real or artificial pleasure for ourselves does not constitute human life, as in this, we are not different from other animals at all.

And Nature programmed us to become human beings above being simply instinctive animals that crave individual survival and pleasures while distancing themselves from pain and suffering. Actually, our human life focused only on personal and selfish “pleasure/pain” calculations is below the level of life animals live.

Animals instinctively and blindly sense and obey Nature’s general balance and homeostasis that is crucially necessary for creating and sustaining life and never violate it “intentionally” unless human interference or natural disasters force them to go beyond the optimal parameters of natural necessities and available resources.

In contrast, human beings recklessly and intentionally accumulate and consume everything for their own selfish sake without any regard for the costs and consequences while ruthlessly competing against and also destroying each other. By default, we behave like viruses and cancer, destroying the system we exist in and destroying ourselves.

Thus without purposefully becoming human beings as Nature’s evolution determined it, without learning and fulfilling the unique, evolutionary Human role in Nature, we will not survive, and on the way to self-destruction, this world is going to become more and more awful and unliveable.

Fortunately, Nature’s evolution also gave us a unique human intellect — we haven’t been using almost at all so far — capable of critical self-assessment and initiating self-change and self-development, leading to becoming “like Nature”, mutually integrated with each other and the Natural system.

Since we have to achieve this truly Human role in Nature against our inherent nature consciously and willingly, in the end, we can become Nature’s only fully conscious, seamlessly integrated and at the same time, independent observers and equal partners.