L’électron libre

A popular proverb says “Have and do what you love, or at least love what you do and have”. Although a fair supporter of the idea of pursuing one’s dreams, there is something just as necessary, fulfilling, and yet easier to achieve: it’s the “love what you have” part.

Because we grew up in the 20th century, we just take for granted what surrounds us nowadays. Same goes for our ancestors, in fact it is a human predisposition. While this drive may help to constantly seek improvement, the side effect is that it keeps you away from being happy with what you have, a wise skill that sometimes takes a lifetime to build if you don’t come around it now.

So take a backpack and go camp in a deserted forest or land, leave your cellphone and any form of technology, and meditate about your daily life. It is well-known that only when taken away from something you realize its real value. So here’s what you will find:

Transportation

Never in the history of mankind, were people as able to fly or transport themselves as they are today. In France for instance, virtually anyone, can save enough money over an acceptable amount of time to go all around the planet. It is the case of most developed countries. Do you really realize? Not even 50 years ago you couldn’t have done that. And 50 years, in regard to the length of humanity…is how lucky you are.

Next time you get on plane, tell yourself that you are the first or second generation to explore the 3rd dimension, out of the 5,300 generations of Homo Sapiens, or 83,000 of Homo that preceded you. They could just crawl on land, you, you can fly.

When I was younger and watched documentaries on safaris and beautiful places allover the world, even at that time I had no idea that one day I could afford to go there myself. You can go to any country. You can meet all the cultures, you can explore the whole planet. This is a privilege that now takes only the mind to put in action, money isn’t anymore the limiting factor. This is insanely unprecedented. Our planet, the only place in the universe where mankind can live, IS, TODAY, totally explorable by you, in much less than ONE lifetime. Do you get a feel of what I am saying? Do you know our ancestors had for long only their feet for that and not enough time, health, and resource to do it. Today, you can explore all there is for men to explore. Amazing! But wait, that’s just the beginning…

Food

Humanity started in a way that has been very dependent on the surroundings,  and relied mainly on collecting food and hunting. A new era was set when our ancestors got rid of the “availability risk”, hence of the need of nomadism, by moving to agriculture and breeding. Not all products were available to all, so international transportation made it possible to eat things that you could never have had in your area otherwise, like say…pineapples in France! 2/3 generations ago eating pineapple was a really hip and rare thing to do. They bragged about it. Also, once the plants were cultivated or killed they were perishable. Recent technologies like freezing foods allowed to reach an even further level of availability. Production under greenhouses makes your favorite products available at any time of the year. And with processed foods now, part of the process of preparing your food is taken away from your time, hands and kitchen at low cost by food-processing companies. There are also malls everywhere. Hunger in this country is something that affects very few people, and the spectrum of choice is unbelievable. “How could your food experience be better?”

Healthcare

Vaccines, X-rays, drugs, knowledge of the human body…all this is very recent. Not so long ago, people used to die of a mere fever, and those antibiotics you took (for granted?), and that doctor that was able to transport himself quickly to you…all of this is the product of long years of improvement. Aren’t we lucky to live in this world, where even the poor can get decent care and avoid suffering and death? Health is the nest of happiness, never in the past has the human kind ever had such an opportunity to be healthy.

Remember last time you had fever or a flu with running nose, and you told yourself “Man, now I realize how lucky I am when I am in good condition”. Do the same gratitude exercise by thinking what your health would have been 50, 200, or 2000 years back from now…you could have been born at that time…but you were born now lucky you.

Communication – The Internet (amongst other fabulous technologies)

I was gonna say this is my favourite point, but no they’re just equally majorly important and interdependent.

I discovered the Internet when I was 16, in 2001, it took a while to realize what that really meant…probably because of the slowness it had at the time, or the cost of it. Then I got the big picture, and I was utterly amazed by how this Internet thing was about to allow unprecedented things. In 2001, people payed on a per-hour or per-minute basis, 50 hours per month was a good deal. It took forever to browse websites, download rates were about 2 to 4 kbps. No Facebook, No Youtube, No Google Maps, almost no nothing! Downloading (legally of course) a movie or a song was a whole event. I was at high-school at the time and the library officer was “copping” around to make sure we made a scholar use of that costly internet…

Today, with a regular connexion, you can download a file at ~300/400 kbps. This means a song or movie can be downloaded at LESS than its playing time. Impossible to think of this 10 years ago.

Internet is the best thing that happened to people and despite my openness to new things, if you’ve read enough about the evolution of mankind, you will understand that another communication blast like the Internet is not likely to happen soon. There will be tons of incremental innovations, but no breakthroughs until the whole paradigm changes again.

I learned to speak most of my English not from school but by calling random people on Skype, and befriending with those strangers on my spare time. They were happy to learn how to curse in French, I was transforming my English from school level to being quite fluent. Yes these were complete strangers, a couple of 70+ year-old folks in Florida, a 50+ year-old from Indiana, and a couple of wacko Australians who probably read this post. Now call me crazy if you want, but I am the crazy who got comfortable speaking a life-changing foreign language! How else than on the internet could you have 1 hour of conversation daily with foreigners, while being in your country….not easy…

I can’t omit to mention how the internet has completely transformed the way we can do business today. In the past you had to work locally, your reach was minimal. Today with the Internet, ANYONE can reach the whole world to sell their product or become a star in their field of expertise, without having to know “the right people” that will lead you all the way there.

Also, never knowledge was so publicly available. 15 years ago, you had to rely on people right around you, on your encyclopedia if you had one at home, and on your local library.

I am not even talking about the cellphone and other communication media, the added-value of which is just as great. You don’t need much imagination to think what your life now would be without a Facebook account and without a cellphone.

Society type

Besides material things, I want to focus on the kind of society most of us live in today and why you should be happy to live in it. In “A Brief History of Everything”, Ken Wilber reminds us the evolution with time of social groups : groups/families, then tribes, villages, empires, states, and a planetary system. Not all countries are democratic, not all people have left a tribal/village way of living. But if you’re lucky enough to live in Europe, North America or other reasonably ‘developed’ areas, you no longer live a local life as compared to the generations before you. Long ago in villages, you didn’t have many options: from women to marry, to your job, to where you’re going to live…With evolutionary psychology, if you came from a place with f****-up people, you’d have little flexibility on the mental predispositions you’d offer to your descendants over many generations. In the same fashion, in the early days of human life, if you were a low-class family in the tribe, your destiny was written and not quite the happiest. Societies have since evolved from a tribal way of living to something safer. Immense progress has been done regarding the human rights…Today, in this planetary society (and with the other improvements above mentioned) virtually anyone can have anything, now matter where they start from. It’s a world of tremendous opportunity.

Bottom line

Some may think that anyone had reasons to be happy at their period, because they had the best of humanity at that time. That’s right, so because you have even more, be even happier OK? Or I’ll put your buttocks on a horse and get you ship my mail across the country!

Never only compare yourself to what other people today can have or can do. Always relate to what the whole of humanity has had or was able to do. Then you will realize how lucky you are with your environment today. It took immense efforts to get where we are today, the work of billions of ancestors must be shown some appreciation, gratitude and respect.

Don’t get me wrong though. I am not calling for just laying back and celebrating what was done before for us. Few people would be able to do it anyway. It is good to innovate and to be frustrated with today’s technology (as long as it’s constructive) but always, with the respect of what was accomplished before. From “This world sucks, we can do better” you will move to “This world is already wonderful and still can improve so much”. Reducing frustration and increasing happiness, may seem equivalent but they are totally different cognitive processes. The latter approach to innovation and accomplishment is the healthiest in my view.