How Have You Constructed Your World?

Right now, take a look around you. What do you see? A smart phone? A groomed lawn? A painted house? A car? A wheel? Stereo headphones? windows? pens? lights? spoons? Beyond what you can see, what else? Climate controlled air? Hear Music? Smell Fragrance? Taste a Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil? Or, what about the things you can’t even sense? The internet? Radio signals? Or within yourself and other humans, the medicines that are regulating our blood pressure, serotonin or cholesterol. 

This podcast deals a lot with topics of the modern world, but perhaps the most obvious notion is that the human experience is defined by all of these things, swirling around us, our own creation, our own inventions. While we’ve learned in previous episodes that other animals can create and use tools, human beings are alone in the animal kingdom in our obsession with continuing to invent a world full of new technology, convenience, innovation and advancements. 

Humans live in a world of Inventions. So \what is it about humans in particular that drives this need to invent? How does the desire to invent our own world impact our relationship with the natural one? 

Which unlikely inventions have had the biggest impact on human existence, and what are the pros and cons of living in such a heavily invented world? 

If you’ve been following for awhile, it’s fair to say the problems we face in modern life are usually my focus. But that’s not totally fair. Some inventions have unintentionally helped human beings immensely, and most inventions, even those that have had negative side effects, started off with the best of intentions and did create a more or less positive change.

We benefit from invention, and also we’ve lost things. It is not inventions themselves, but our relationship to them, and how we choose to use them, that can remove us, or in a more optimistic world, connect us deeply to the natural world.