I’m obsessed with the idea that a guy who wears jeans and drives a Jeep today is basically the same creature that wore animal skins and lived on hand-caught river fish 20,000 years ago.
Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities.
I’ve previously described my favorite illustration of this point: imagine a group of prehistoric hunter-gathers, who didn’t even have textiles yet, discovering a modern landfill. It would be an unimaginable sea of blessings: tools, materials, clothing, food, and ideas galore. The hundreds of circling seagulls alone would be a such a blessing they’d tell the story for generations. They’d build the first city there and write the great blessing-pile into their scriptures.
Modern people are accustomed to such an abundance of even better blessings that the hunter-gatherer’s great blessing-pile is actually our refuse — an embarrassing heap of dirty, relatively hard-to-use stuff that we bury in the ground.
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I remember a surreal moment about twenty years ago, which felt like the beginning of something bad, and it was.
I was at a bowling alley with some friends, and a few people in our group were talking about Facebook. I knew what it was but had no interest in it. Then one of them turned to me and said, “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook!”
This kind of stunned me and I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t joined this website but somehow I was one of its features.
A year later all of us were using it. It was exciting at first, because it seemed to give us more access to the people in our lives. We could post photos, make plans, and stay connected to a wider circle of people.
I should note for younger readers that the term “people” at that time only referred to real, physical beings: persons with bodies that walked and drove around and did things. Having friends largely meant physically traveling to the same apartment, bowling alley, restaurant, or movie theater, positioning our bodies amongst each other in this physical space, and interacting using our faces and voices and hearts. The part of your life that consisted of this type of physical activity was called social life.
Social media was meant to facilitate this thing called social life. Facebook’s original purpose was to keep you in touch with people who would otherwise fall out of your social circle, namely people you went to school with.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
I mean in general that indulgence in vice takes time, energy, and money used to do better things.