Know thy species

Knowing nothing of engines, like me, if someone stumbled upon a lonesome carburetor it wouldn’t be crazy to mistake it for a sprinkler head, a bougie-ass coffee machine, or perhaps a stoner's favorite 420 toy. 

I mean, c’mon, look at it… 

To us motor noobs, this sprinkler-lookin-ass apparatus only makes sense once we understand the greater system from which it was birthed. Now, I don’t give a dogs tittie about carburetors, engines, or cars (definitely not cars) and I most certainly am not here to write about them today.

I am, however, here to write from my perspective. Me, Lucas. How I see the world. 

I have a burning desire to live a meaningful life and in turn, want to understand myself– more, deeper. 

I’m not entirely sure where this desire stems from, or if I am unique in this, but the Stoic aphorism, saved in the notes of my phone from 2018, is feeling alive for me right now. 

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” 

I guess I want to be wise. I’m not even sure what that means, but feeling into it a bit, I think it’s true. I want to be more wise. 

There we go, I said it. 

This means doing the work of understanding myself. Peeling back the layers. Diving inward. 

And zooming out. 

[Insert carburetor metaphor here.]

“Myself” only makes sense once I understand the greater system from which I was birthed. If I neglect to place myself within this greater system, I risk mistaking myself for something I am not. 

Amidst all of today’s noise, I don’t want to be disillusioned: our species is older than the 12,000-year civilized, sedentary, and modern period for which our historical and religious texts recount. 

Although my iPhone 8’s calendar app reads “2023” and starts at Jesus Christ’s birthday, and despite the illusion that cars, television, and industrial agriculture have seemingly existed forever, there is something bigger going on. 

There is a longer arc to the human timeline. Like, much longer. And if the five-foot-nine-inch perspective of humanity is all I know, and I neglect to take advantage of the three-thousand-foot viewpoint, I’m not seeing the whole picture.

Knowing thy species is a necessary first step to understanding thyself. 

Industrialism mixed with manipulative marketing, aimed to make an extra buck, is a dangerous cocktail. One that has accelerated civilization at break-kneck speed. A pace so fast, in fact, that our collective organism is losing touch with what matters most: Our collective well-being. 

Western ideals and The American Dream have unwittingly severed us from the only source of this collective well-being: the primal roots from which we originate.

The wisdom of Homo Sapiens. 

It is easy to mistake a carburetor for a sprinkler head. Just as it is easy to mistake “thyself”, and our purpose, for consumptive, materialistic, domesticated, over-civilised, money-hoarding, workers.

A large part of my identity, purpose, and self-worth is tied to my job and making money. But it has not always been this way, and nor does it have to be– this way of life, I want to remind myself, is but a blip within the Homo Sapiens heroic history. 

And is, in fact, not the norm. Not Amazon, not concrete, not Tinder, not cars. 

We are at a fork in the road: Merge our reality into Meta’s virtual one, or reorient with the hominids that we are? 

It’s time to stop chasing shiny objects and start reconnecting with the wisdom of Us. 

That face-to-face, boots-on-the-ground style, ya know? Which, to me, can mean only one thing. 

Off is the new one and it’s time to unplug. 

And thirty of us are going to be living it next week, breathing fresh air over the summer solstice, in the yonder mountains of Helena, MT.