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 remember my first real-time online interaction. It was 1993, and I was navigating through a local BBS on my trusty 2400 baud modem. Some of you may have used BBSes back in the day, but most of you probably don’t know what that is. BBS stands for Bulletin Board System, which is just a software program on someone else’s computer, where different users could log via phone line on and read news, play simple games, download programs or leave messages.
Most BBSes only had one incoming line, so you couldn’t be online at the same time as anyone else. If you attempted to reach the BBS when someone else was on, you got a busy signal. Even though BBSes had many members, it really was a solo activity, you just explored what other people had left there, hence the monikier Bulletin Board. Still, they fascinated me.
One day, while I was reading some crude, text-based message board, the screen went black. At the top, letter by letter, words began to appear, as if I was typing them. But wasn’t me, it was someone else! My heart started pounding. Life! There was a living, breathing person using my computer, in my basement, from somewhere out there. It was astonishing and terrifying, like I was encountering an alien. Read More
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.
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by
David on April 13, 2009
Now, I don’t know all 6.5 billion of you out there, but of the few hundred people that I do know, I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t like to be happy. I think we all have that in common.
Type “Happiness” into Amazon’s book search and you’ll get over 350,000 results. For some reason, humans have a lot of trouble being happy. There’s no question that we all want it, so why are we so bad at it? With such universal demand, you’d think we’d have it figured out by now.
There seems to be some persistent force that keeps us unhappy. It’s almost like humans have some curious fetish with dissatisfaction. Read More
by
David on March 15, 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. 
Wow, this was so inspiring, David! Thank you!