I’ve slowly come to accept that humans are not special. Or we are, but no more than any other life form. As much as I like the idea of being a member of a privileged, ‘higher’ species, I just can’t find any clear distinction between us and other animals.
Superficial differences are easy to find: sure we can build cars and write novels and vote in elections, but these are just behaviors we’ve come to engage in; they don’t exactly make us anything different that just a spectacularly intelligent animal.
In school, children are taught in certain terms that animals are a different type of being than people. There’s Old McDonald, and his animals: the pig, the goat, the rooster. Even a five-year old playing with farm animal toys knows that the chicken, cow and horse go inside the little white plastic fence, and Mr and Mrs McDonald belong firmly on the outside.
There are cultural and economic reasons for this imaginary line in the sand, and I won’t get into them here, but it seems clear to me now that all organisms on earth are just different approaches mother nature has taken towards the same end. Life simply insists on living, in whatever way it is able. In all of its forms, from people to dandelions to mosquitoes, life just stubbornly does its thing, whatever that may be. Read More
I’ve interrupted my regular posting schedule to bring you this important message.
On Sunday, well-known and well-liked blogger Leo Babauta of ZenHabits received an email from the lawyers of author Susan Jeffers, claiming that he had infringed on her trademark in one of his posts by using the phrase “feel the fear and do it anyway” — the title of Jeffers’ book.
That Leo had never heard of the book is, from a legal standpoint, supposedly not relevant. The fact that he was only repeating an intuitive phrase he’d heard from a friend on Twitter (to whom he did give credit in the post) does not excuse him from his offense. It is his responsibility to be aware that the words he used to convey his point had been rendered off-limits by somebody else’s choosing them for a book title, years earlier. Considering how many books and products are out there, I wonder how many of my posts contain book titles or slogans, and whether I’ve already got threatening letters on the way. Read More
by
David on April 28, 2009
I used to roll my eyes when people talked about the Beatles. Maybe you rolled your eyes when you saw this article’s headline. Thank you for bearing with me anyway. I’ll make it worth your while.
I had always pictured the Beatles as a tired novelty from my parents’ past. All I knew was that they played lot of teenagey love songs in their early years, and some weird drug songs in their later years, and that they seemed to have written virtually every famous song that I didn’t want to listen to.
Gradually I came around, and began to recognize that they really were something special. I harbored an understated respect for them for many years, but two summers ago I spent a few incredible weeks devouring all twelve proper Beatles albums, in chronological order. It was magical. I was struck by how beautifully and organically their sound evolved, growing more sophisticated and mature every album.
By the final phrases of of Abbey Road, I had grown too. And not insignificantly. I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what moved me, but it definitely had something to do with the beautiful metamorphosis I witnessed. Read More
by
David on April 24, 2009
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross
I am indeed prone to hyperbole, but I’ll go ahead and say it: the advent of writing is by far the greatest tipping point in all of civilization. Often I think about the instant in which it happened, that very first moment when a primitive person scored a few strokes on a rock face, in order to demonstrate some idea, however simple, to another cave-dweller.
It floors me that there was a specific point in time (maybe at seventeen minutes after sunrise on the 25th day of the year 42,128 B.C.) when a few people convened to attempt to relate something to each other with markings on a wall. They could never have imagined the epic, world-changing sequence of events triggered by this tiny, innocuous act, but I suspect that each of those individuals left that little gathering with an as-yet-unprecedented sense of understanding and closeness to their peers.
That first instance of symbol-scrawling unlocked an incalculably powerful ability in humans. Suddenly, knowledge was no longer confined to an individual’s memory. It could be transferred, replicated, stored and accumulated. It could be displayed in a public area, for an entire community to see and absorb into their own personal knowledge. Each individual could now contribute their own exclusive insights and experiences to a collective, whereby everyone could gain from them.
Whatever happened that day exactly, it marked the point in time when knowledge became bigger than any one person. Finally we could accumulate information and insight outside of our addled, vulnerable brains. Writing made thought permanent, immortal.
Read More
by
David on April 13, 2009
I'm David and Raptitude is a street-level look at the human experience -- what makes human beings do what they do, and what that means in real life.
I write about how to make sense of the earth's most ridiculous animal, how to get better at being one of them, and how only those two things can save the world. 
Hi Julie, good to hear from you. I'm still determined to take a road trip across the south, then out to LA, but I don't know where it is in my always-growing sequence of upcoming trips. :)