What are we working towards?
Technology keeps advancing further and further, but it doesn’t invent itself. Humankind has put a lot of work into creating all manner of devices to speed up and automate daily tasks, reduce workloads, and increase leisure time. Yet the more advanced we become, the more problems we seem to cause ourselves in the form of stress-related disorders, pollution, and corruption. With all this going on, we have a tendency to get lost in the details of our lives, and pay no attention to *why* the details are so prolific. Think about it. We have a whole system set up, which is referred to by many as the “rat race,” which controls our lives and sustains itself on our efforts to maintain or advance our standing within it.
Think about money. What is money? Technically, all it is is a bunch of little green rectangles with numbers on them. Yet we chase these little green rectangles around as though they were a staple food. These little green rectangles rule nearly every aspect of our lives, when in truth, they are just meaningless scraps of woven fiber that have no value unless everyone agrees that they do. Which, for some incomprehensible reason, everyone *does* agree on. Right now the U.S. dollar is backed by absolutely nothing. Even when it *was* backed by gold, what good is that? If a person is starving, what good is a piece of linen representing x amount of gold going to do them? Gold isn’t edible.
But this isn’t about economics. Not entirely. We have our wonders of technology, our skyscrapers, our space program. And for what? We seem to be going to a lot of trouble to do whatever it is that we’re doing, what with setting up our artificial economies, systems of government, means of inter-continental communications. What is this goal of ours? What is it that we are working towards, that we are willing to subject ourselves to such a bureaucracy? It certainly must be something great, because it sure isn’t survival. Survival can be accomplished without all this, so why go to the trouble unless it’s for something more?