The need to belong and conform clawed at him in disguises, tied as he was genetically to the wanderings of his hunter gatherer ancestors whose chances of survival increased exponentially when they travelled or lived together in groups, lest they were killed by animals or other wandering bands of humans.
However, he didn’t need to belong to a group in order to survive. This was the age of humans, a species that had jumped to the top of the biological food chain since the past ten thousand years, having settled down to commence the agricultural revolution, choosing to give the hunter gatherer life a rest to focus more on reproduction and pampered stomachs leading to population explosions and diseases spreading around settlements, a bad deal in his opinion.
He wasn’t in any danger of food stocks running out, especially as he lived in a cosmopolitan city, where freshly cooked food dotted every street corner, in addition to the availability of packaged, processed or ready to eat food in storefronts. But then every decision’s long-term consequences, in this case trading a nomadic life for settling down around agricultural fields, were seldom thought of, and even if they were, they were mostly ignored out of mental laziness and an attitude that bordered on procrastinating it for later.
In retrospect, it was necessary to belong to a few groups, if not many. Only because, sometimes, sometimes conversations led to new ideas and faster flow of information, in comparison to living in a silo and hoping for something good to happen in someone’s life. Like the fact that, in order to meet, connect and build meaningful and deep relationships, it paid to get out of one’s comfort zone once in a while and talk around, because one never knew what may come out of it, personally or professionally, especially if someone professionally belonged to an arena that required good inter-personal skills to get deals in the pipeline and get business.
There were a few moments in his life every week where he would grow very anxious, suddenly a spade of thoughts that would grip his head like an iron clad vice, spooking his mind about his future prospects, in spite of the fact that he was mature enough, possessing the correct blend of confidence and skills to survive and thrive, with a disclaimer that learning new things was a continuous process rather than a fixed destination unlike the lives of the previous generations who managed to get by for decades without any significant technological change.
He realised his anxiety was once again rooted in evolutional hard wiring of his brain, the anxiety gene having passed down through multiple generations of the millennia gone by, to cajole him into constantly evaluating his survival chances in light of the dynamic changes that were the norm in today’s new world, a world that struggled to understand itself and spewed opinions of questionable and malicious intentions left, right and centre, though he wasn’t worried, because the fact remained that, the evil minds were comfortably outnumbered by the good.
He would be the creator of his own world, and strategise with one mindful eye on his environment, to filter intentions and outlooks about the grand meaning or purpose of life, because fundamentally, what did it mean to be a human? What did it mean to live? What did it mean to get up everyday and create meaningful things, when one might as well use substances and hack one’s biochemical algorithms that was hardwired into our genes, the ultimate feedback system. Were human beings just algorithms? Our phenomena of consciousness and the output of thoughts, coded by someone as mere objects possessing features to interact and mate with fellow objects?
However, what about the phenomena of the objects themselves creating more objects, harnessing the resources of the environment we found ourselves in? We’re creating more feedback loops and intelligent systems around our own coded objects in the energy, transport and communication industries to interact with one another. Would this phenomena result in the dawn of a new consciousness?
Marijuana Maharaj 