Beauty vs Control

It is a weird experience to live on this planet in 2023. With all the great inventions and technological progress, we have created a world of comfort and accessibility. Most of us work in a physically less demanding office job since machines have replaced the hard labor and instead of growing our own food and cooking it, we can just order a ready-to-eat meal to our doorstep within minutes. Where there was once an endless forest you now find gigantic cities that house thousands of people. Nature had to make space so we could feed our ever-growing demand for resources.

And for some reason, we rarely question any of this. Instead, we celebrate it in the name of progress. From a young age, we get trained to suppress our human nature for movement, curious exploration, and connectedness to fit into the system. In school, we ask six-year-olds to sit still in a chair for hours a day in an indoor classroom lit up by fluorescent tubes. We place great importance on their ability to recite the knowledge they are fed instead of encouraging their innovative thinking and ability to critically question authority. And around this age, the race for MORE seems to begin. It is like an endless ladder that we start climbing. Get good grades, get into the right college, get a well-paying job, and advance in your career so that in the end you can own as many boxes as possible - from a TV to a house, a car, a pool ...

The metric of success becomes the number in our bank account instead of the number of smiles on our faces and those we invoke in others. We measure a number that belongs to an individual and that is created by a personal effort instead of taking the well-being of a community or an ecosystem into account. Therefore we encourage competition, extraction and dominance over acts of kindness, giving and love.

Probably by accident, we have therefore created a world that is actually difficult to live in. But there is often no time to reflect on this. We need to work hard and do the self-development and be an amazing mother/ father/ partner all at the same time. We might wonder why we don't feel fulfilled and full of energy without realizing that over decades we have created an environment that is not serving us. We might not realize that we have this deep craving for connection with nature and others and instead just try to fill the hole inside us by buying more possessions. We chase that never-ending promise that the next thing will make us happy.

On this path, we have managed to destroy the very planet that we call home and that can provide us with everything we could ever need. We have exploited her soil to grow food easier and faster until we deprived it of all its nutrients, we overfish her oceans, chopped down her trees and left the space bare and vulnerable to corrosion. We took her wild lands and transformed them into farms and housing. We are now at a point where wild animals only make up 4% of all mammals walking this earth and swimming through our oceans. The rest are held in cages as livestock or in zoos. And we have created a similar environment for us.

It seems that we need to dominate and control because we don't trust life to be abundant and to gift us with all that we need. It comes from a mentality of lack where we are separate from the nature that is all around us and that created us in the first place. It is as if we are blind to the breathtaking beauty that can be found in every sunset, wildflower, or wave crashing against the shore. Mirrored in that is the inability to see our own beauty. To fall so deeply in love with oneself that all we can do is love everything around us because we understand that we are that and that is us. When are we going to wake up to marvel at our own beauty?