What choice does a tree have than grow like the tree it was born as? Earth gave life and the tree grew. For millions of years, humans were one of the inhabitants of this world. We grew like trees and shrubs. Such a complete lack of choice must have been terrible.
What do you do when you have an active prefrontal cortex and no choice in a world, no control? You create another world where you get to have better choices — even if the new world constrains you hugely in other ways. This world could be completely fabricated. It could be a piece of imagination in our shared minds. But it’s a place where we can have choice and control.
Imagination for a long time was the alternate world where we could escape to. But reality has a way of seeping into imagination. So we had to construct a make-believe world that is so addictive that we forget the alternate way of living.
Be it a family, community, or country — each social unit tries to create its own world within the universe we all share. They frame a specific set of rules and ways of life to project their alternate reality. We call this culture. The day we lose this, we become like trees. Not that it's a worse way of living. But it needs an acceptance of life. It needs us to go where life wants us to. It requires us to flow with life. For some reason our ego doesn’t want this. We don’t want to submit to the rules of the earth. We want to bend it. We want to subserve it, acquire it. We created an alternate world that redefined what world means — so much that, in a short while there will be very few remnants of the old world.
People will seek to create new worlds. This is not going to stop. Not even with Metaverse.
In a world where there are lesser resources and a lot more people than ever before — we have to find a safe way to desire and achieve emotional experiences without having to savage the earth and life around us. Absorbing ourselves in the world of virtual beings can be a sustainable way of providing emotional wellbeing. In a way, this might lead to lesser exploitation. That’s one big might.
Internet is capable of providing emotional experiences as the physical world does. We haven’t explored it much as yet, but this is inevitable. In this new alternate world, the rules change.
Critics have a problem with social media because it's distracting. The question, though is, what is it distracting us from? Distraction from the contemporary world we created or the old world that was before this or the one before that? Whose world is this? Who majorly influenced the creation of this world? Who loses much when this world changes?
People seek new worlds when they find the old worlds choice-less. It’s this “seeking” that leads us to “evolve” if you want to call it that.
We can’t undo the destruction of a human-made world. When we create a world of new possibilities, it also harms us in a certain way. We can only shift from one world to another, hoping that we do lesser damage to the world around us.
PC- https://www.boredpanda.com/minimalistic-illustrations-environmental-issues-egle-plytnikaite