Surviving the 21st century
Surviving the 21st century is easy. All you need is a smartphone, internet, a functioning brain crammed with useless information, and a pair of eyes with selective vision.
Every day we wake up, go to work or school, meet friends, come back home, and wait for the entire cycle to restart. Every day we watch the news and surf the internet. We see the dead bodies, we see our world dying slowly before our very eyes but all we do is turn the channel to our favorite shows. Why?
It’s just easier than the alternative.
It’s easier to go about our days and act like clueless robots rather than face the reality that is blinding us. It’s easier to go to school and break our backs for an uncertain future. Let’s try to master Latin and video games production while a nuke is heading our way to blast us to oblivion. Complain about the lack of good cartoons not the lack of resources to provide everyone a comfortable living.
These recent years, the risks of dying in a million different gruesome ways have multiplied by more than a hundred percent. However, we are at the most advanced period for humanity. We keep updating our technologies and medicine which in turn increase our lifespan but the dangers looming over our head is practically taking over these added years. Yesterday, it was a school shooting. Today, it’s an attack on a city. Tomorrow we will face another world war that can wipe out the planet. Fun, how about a selfie to go immortalize this moment?
When do we take time to enjoy those few years that modern medicine have procured us and produce something good from it? Never. We are way too busy acting nonchalant at humanity’s suffering – too busy masking our fatale wounds with every day routines.
In school we’re provided with the intellectual knowledge needed to understand the wrongs that are happening around us but no one care enough to teach the moral standards nor gain the courage needed to stop them.
In a couple of years, wildlife will no longer need our help to survive. It will be their turn to help us because our own attitude will turn us into an endangered species. Perhaps that’s what we need. Perhaps then we will wake from our slumber and acknowledge what we have done. Perhaps then we will stop striving to be the next Beyoncé but we will fight to save ourselves and put a stop to our own stupidity.
On another thought, maybe the time has come to accept our defeat. Maybe we’re not meant to survive the 21st century in the first place. We’re no better than any other species so it’s about time for us to give back what we claimed as ours but never was.
