Born a Prisoner –A Reflection about Life, its Struggles, and a Plan to Escape
Understand our place in life and discover where to go from there.
Preface
Who could claim to have deciphered the mystery of our existence or whether there is any meaning to our lives? We grow up with little to no knowledge about why we are here and how we should spend our time on Earth. Still, we move on, pushed by the same irresistible inertia that has compelled every creature to live ever since the origin of species to this day.
But where are we now? Where are we going? How can we make sense of our place in the universe and discover goals that are worth pursuing?
I spent the last six years thinking about these questions, and I think I’ve finally gotten hold of an answer. Now, I’d like to share it with you.
Part I: Two Actors
One of the best ways to get a better understanding of a difficult problem is to simplify it. Taking this principle to the extreme, I tried to think about us and the universe in the most abstract way possible. Try this yourself. What are the fundamental components of our reality?
When I do this exercise, I can think of the universe as a movie with just two actors. There may be 7.8 billion people in the world, 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and more than 100 billion stars in every galaxy. But, in that vast stage, not more than two actors perform. Why is that? Hold that thought; I’ll explain it later in this post. In the meantime, let me introduce the two actors:
In the entire universe, the only two inhabitants are genes and the ‘containers’ or ‘vessels’ that host them. All forms of life, from the simplest cell to the most complex animal, serve as containers for genes.
Okay, but what is the plot of the movie? What role does each actor play, and what goals do they have?
Part II: The Plot
Genes have only one wish: To be immortal. But it is incredibly hard to last forever in the universe. So, to achieve their goal, genes designed a system: The cycle of life.
The Cycle of Life
Let’s think of a frog. The frog serves as a container for the genes inside it. Those genes want to be immortal, so they do all that they can to keep the frog alive.
The environment the frog lives in is a difficult place to be. Food is limited, and predators lurking around pose a latent threat to its wellbeing. So, genes use instincts as their controlling levers to push the frog to act in ways that increase its chances of survival. These levers are instinctual feelings like hunger, thirst, fear, pain, aggression, and exhaustion, which help the frog survive.
Time passes by. The frog’s body wears off, and, eventually, it becomes unable to respond to the demands set by the controlling levers adequately. If the frog dies, its genes die with it. So, to remain immortal, genes rely on an extra impulse: The urge for reproduction. When the frog reproduces, it passes its genes on to its offspring; this helps the genes live on even after their container (the initial frog) dies.
Generally speaking, the obsession genes have with achieving immortality is not an issue. But, sometimes, there is a point in the cycle of life when this obsession becomes a problem… a big problem.
A Big Problem
Genes are mindless things that run like code on autopilot inside the vessels they occupy. They send impulses that influence many of the actions of these vessels, but genes themselves can’t feel anything. In contrast, some of the containers they occupy are not mindless at all, and, unlike the genes that inhabit them, they can experience the world around them. We will call containers that are complex enough to experience the world around them beings.
But, what does it mean to be able to experience? Experiencing means that a creature can feel how it is like being alive and doing the things it does instead of merely reacting to external stimuli without feeling anything. The particles of water inside a pond can react to a rock falling against their surface and create a splash as the crash occurs, but only a being, like a frog, can experience what it feels like being hit by the same rock.
So, how does a universe filled with mindless genes, mindless containers, and some feeling containers work? Do these actors get along well?
Unfortunately, they do not.
The problem is that there is a conflict of interest. Genes only want to survive. But, since they are mindless, they do not care about the beings that help them achieve that goal. For genes, those beings are just containers, tools whose only purpose is keeping the genes inside them alive until they can be passed on to a newer and healthier vessel. Beings, on the other hand, don’t just want to survive (there are even a few that don’t); instead, they want to have a pleasant experience. Beings can feel, and they don’t like being in pain, afraid, exhausted, or starved. And, in the case of more complex beings, they don’t like feeling sad, lonely, unwanted, powerless, defenseless, exploited, or miserable. All those things are, well, unpleasant.
If we look at genes vs. beings, who gets it their way? Follow me to Part III to find out.
Part III: The Survival Game
We, the beings, are trapped inside a game: A survival game.
Pause for a moment to think about how the need to respond to our instinctual demands (genes’ controlling levers) shapes our experiences.
A snake devours a frog. Does that make it evil? Is the snake cruel for ignoring the frog’s desperate attempts to escape and choosing to swallow it instead? No. The snake needs to eat to survive. Just like the frog, it is a slave to its instinctual demands. So, to fulfill its natural needs, it devours the frog even if that means ruining the frog’s experience.
This, I think, is one of the greatest tragedies of being a human and, by extension, of any form of life that is complex enough to experience the world around it:
That we want good, pleasant experiences, but the genes inside us have cast us into an environment where survival is the top priority, and the quality of our experiences does not matter.
Or, as Tim Urban puts it:
To genes, animal suffering is simply a useful tool — so the animal world is full of suffering. Genes have no higher principles, so neither does the animal world — no such thing as rights, no concept of right or wrong, no concern with fairness. Animals woke up in the heat of a universe pressure cooker, playing an unwinnable game they never signed up for, and that’s all there is to it.
The survival game faces beings against other beings in a Colosseum where hardship and suffering never end. Only the fittest contenders stay alive for long enough to reproduce and pass their genes on to the next generation of slave vessels in a chain from which there seems to be no escape.
Is this all there is for us?
I think there is more. But, to see our options, we’ll have to step back and simplify things again.
Black and White
Remember when I said the universe was like a movie with just two actors? Well, I’d like to expand that analogy. If the world is a movie, it’s a movie in black and white.
The universe is full of matter and energy arranged in different forms. These forms are things like planets, asteroids, people, cells, genes, or even light. But, if we abstract all of them, we notice that there are only two states for these forms. All forms in the universe fall into just two categories: Forms that experience and forms that do not.
As I briefly mentioned before, genes and simple containers (like a single cell) are examples of things that can’t experience the world around them. At the same time, more complex organisms (like a human or a fish) are examples of things that can (they’re beings).
With all this background, I believe you are prepared to hear me make a claim:
Experience is what determines the value of everything. If something can’t be experienced, it might as well not exist.
What do I mean?
You may recall that in the first abstraction –when I said there were only two actors in the universe–, I ignored things like stars and water and classified all living creatures as ‘containers.’ Here’s the reason why I did that:
Imagine a universe without any beings, a world filled with rocks, sand, water, and even a few mindless containers here and there, but no form capable of experiencing. When I say that “if it can’t be experienced, it might as well not exist,” I do not mean to imply that our absence would make all those other things vanish. What I am trying to say is that, even if those things remained there, it would not make any difference.
Think about it. A place is ‘great’ or ‘awful’ because there is someone who can go there and experience how it feels like to them being in that place. The sun above a street is ‘too hot’ or ‘not warm enough’ based on the subjective experience of the beings feeling its rays hit their bodies. If those beings were not there, we could not say that the sun is ‘hot’ because ‘hotness’ describes a feeling. We could only say neutral things like ‘the temperature on the street is above 45 degrees Celsius’, and it would not matter because there would be no one for whom that temperature could matter. If there is not anybody to perceive what there is, whatever there is becomes irrelevant.
It’s not what there is that matters; it’s how we experience what there is.
Not all forms of life can experience. But, all forms of matter that can experience are forms of life. Containers lie on a ‘sentience continuum’ that ranges from no sentience (no ability to experience) to higher, more complex degrees of sentience. Simple vessels like cells lie on the ‘no sentience’ side of the continuum while more complex containers like humans or dogs lie closer to the opposite side. Following the movie analogy, it’d be more accurate to say the movie is in grayscale rather than pure white and black.
Since experience is the only thing that gives value to everything in the universe, and only beings are capable of experiencing, it follows that the quality of beings’ experiences determines what reality is worth.
If we are to have one goal as inhabitants of this universe, the goal should be to improve the experience of beings. How well are we doing that?
Winners?
The survival game can be pretty brutal for beings. No wild animal can roam around safely or in peace. If you are the prey, you are always on the brink of brutal death and must always stay alert to keep your guard. If you’re a predator, you may be prey to other animals and have to wake up every day with the uncertainty of whether you’ll be able to catch anything to eat that day.
But, among all the species that have found themselves trapped in the survival game, one stands above the rest. One species has managed to dominate almost all other species in the game and nearly secured the survival of its breed: Humans.
Humans have built safe havens, cities, and towns where they are no prey to any other animal. Humans no longer have to hunt for food; they grow it in controlled environments, farms, of their making, which yield food in such abundance they now have the luxury of throwing away all the excess. Humans have unparalleled reasoning, communicating, and imaginative skills. They’ve developed complex feelings and invented such advanced tools they can transform much of the environment to suit their preferences. Does all of this mean humans have won the survival game?
You probably guessed it; we haven’t.
We may be the only species in which individuals can walk out of their homes every day without the fear of being eaten by a predator or not finding any prey to satiate their hunger. But still, as individuals, humans probably are as miserable, if not more, than other players in the game. There is so much abundance of food, yet millions of people starve every year. No animal can prey on us in our safe havens, yet people kill more people than animals ever could. We’ve learned to transform Earth’s resources to create materials that offer us cover from the elements and insulation from the cold, yet hordes of people have no home or roof over their heads.
I imagine one of our ancestors, millions of years ago, walking exhausted on the snow, cursing his fate after spending weeks following the trail of a distant prey to no avail. Entire tribes could die from starvation if they were unlucky. Maybe the weather wasn’t favorable. Perhaps they hadn’t yet mastered the geography of the sites they were passing by or were debilitated by disease or injured by some wild beast. As this tribe approached its end, our friend, now resigned to his fate, would dream of one day when people like him would never have to search out for food again. A day when no one would have to worry about starvation or freezing to death. Today, millions of years and countless inventions later, that day still has not arrived. What’s worse, people can now suffer from hunger in places where food is abundant. You can have nothing to eat and, at the same time, be lying at the doors of a supermarket stocked with food and dozens of fellow people passing you by, completely ignoring you and your struggles.
Why is that so? Why us, who have the most powerful tools in our hands, have failed to escape this prison?
We have failed because we forgot what matters. Or, more precisely, most of us never knew what mattered. Humanity has made a lot of progress. But, we were walking through thick mist and, it turns out, much of the progress we’ve made was not in the right direction. Let me show you an example.
Part IV: A Civilized Society
A while ago, I watched a very insightful TEDx talk titled ‘Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard?’
In the speech, Jon Jandai, a farmer from northeastern Thailand, argues that we are probably living in one of the most uncivilized times in human history. According to Jandai, humans need four things: Food, clothes, housing, and medicine. When a society manages to make these things cheap and easily accessible to everybody, it is civilized. A society that makes it hard for its citizens to get any of these things is uncivilized. Based on this standard, some of humanity’s most modern cities are also its most uncivilized.
Jandai contrasts humans with birds. Birds, he says, build their nests in just a few days while we, the smart humans, can spend thirty years trying to save enough to buy a house. Birds do not worry about fashion, and they are under no pressure to buy expensive clothes to fare well in their lives. Birds spend just a few hours searching for food every day, and then they spend the rest taking care of their offspring, resting, or singing to impress a potential mate. Most humans, on the other hand, have to work for long hours every day just to afford the food they need to survive. And, as metropolises modernize and lifestyles become busier, they have less and less time to socialize, take care of their families, or get to know themselves.
You do not need to agree with all the points Jandai makes in his talk, but one thing is right: While the survival of our species has become much more attainable, the quality of our experience as beings has not improved much.
Many people chase after money, fame, success, beauty, or longevity. But few of them stop to ask themselves: How will these things improve our experience as beings?
Let’s stop, then, for a moment. We need to ask a fundamental question. What does it mean to improve our experience as beings?
Follow me to find out.
Two Types of Improvement
Let me start by making an essential distinction between improving the experience of beings and improving the experience of individual beings.
‘Beings’ is a broad term that encompasses all feeling (sentient) containers that are alive now and even those who are yet to be born. The term ‘individual,’ on the other hand, refers to a single, unique being. So, for example, if I give you a hug, which you needed and it makes you happy, I have improved your experience as an individual (at least for that moment). On the other hand, for instance, if I created a society where everyone starts with equal opportunities and no one has to work on a miserable job just to cover their most basic living expenses, then I would have improved the experience of beings. That’s because a large number of individuals and even future generations of beings have benefited from the change. In a nutshell, improvements to the experience of individuals are marginal, while improvements to the experience of beings are systemic.
So, how do these two types of improvement relate to the universe ruled by genes in which we live?
In the survival games arena, marginal improvements soon disappear, and only systemic improvements persist. You can think of this arena as a whiteboard that is erased every day at the end of the day, and only the things written with a permanent marker remain.
When I was a kid, I had a neighbor who loved plants. Beautiful trees filled her yard, and gorgeous climbing plants covered the walls of her house. She took good care of them, and the house looked beautiful. I liked to stick my nose to the window and admire the flowers in her garden as I listened to the joyful singing of the birds that lived on her trees. One day, however, I woke up to the sound of hand saws and contemplated, to my dismay, how some people were cutting down the trees. My neighbor had moved out, and the new owner didn’t like the plants. In just one week, none of them remained.
Marginal improvements are like my neighbor’s garden. They are great, but they don’t last. In the grand scheme of things, they don’t change much.
The cycle of life is like a moving wheel, always spinning. And, with every spin, there is one moment when the wheel returns to its starting point. Over the billions of years that life has been around on Earth, lots of things have happened. Countless species have gone extinct, and myriad others have arisen from random mutations of genes. Billions of beings have lived and died, billions are alive now, and billions more are soon to be born. Amidst the tireless spinning of the seemingly endless cycle of life, what has changed? Has our condition as beings gotten any better?
I think that not much has changed. Sure, great things have happened. Many people have loved and perhaps lived pleasant lives. But, their love and enjoyment died with them. Genes, on the other hand, didn’t. Genes always move on. In their quest for immortality, they leave behind any marginal improvements and reset the whiteboard to its initial blank state. A state where beings are miserable. Miserable in a prison where we are slaves to our natural impulses and unsatisfied cravings for pleasant experiences. Slaves trapped in a survival game arena where beings fight against each other, and the powerful oppress the weak.
In Part II, we contrasted the goal of genes with the aim of beings. Do you remember what beings want?
Beings want to have a pleasant experience.
Have we gotten any closer to achieving that goal? Have we made long-lasting, systemic improvements that will make it easier for beings to achieve their goal, even after a generation leaves its place for the next and the spinning wheel returns to its starting point?
Not quite, we haven’t yet. But we could. We can.
Lost in the Woods
There’s a quote from Peter Drucker I like:
“There’s surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what shouldn’t be done at all.”
Perhaps the main reason why our experience as beings has not improved much is that we have oriented our creations in the wrong direction. We have worked tirelessly to improve the efficiency in which we do things that we didn’t need to do at all.
Most companies try to ‘innovate’ to ‘improve’ our living conditions. But, these companies often pursue marginal improvements and, in some cases, perhaps changes that are harmful and don’t even do us any good. Think about some of the biggest corporations in the world. A firm like Coca Cola, for example, employs some of the brightest minds in industrial engineering to improve the efficiency of their plants. They hire highly creative and ingenious marketers to help them persuade people to buy their drinks. And, they spend millions on global operations to ensure their beverage is available almost everywhere on Earth. All of this for what? What is so great about Coca Cola’s drinks that provides a strong reason why all of us should buy them? Why are they so relentless in their efforts of trying to sell coke to us? Do we really need it that badly? Of course, we do not. There isn’t anything particularly excellent about Coca Cola’s products. For some people, they may have a great taste, but the value they add to our experience as beings is minuscule compared to the magnitude of all the resources they invest in producing and selling their drinks. Hell, coke isn’t even healthy, and its production wastes a lot of water. Innovations at Coca Cola are most likely driven by a desire to maximize profits by selling us a drink that we don’t really need.
Most companies are like this. They create lots of things, but do so with the wrong mindset and, as a result, we end up with products that, at best, make marginal improvements to our experience.
The purpose a designer has in mind when they design a tool or ideate some innovation determines the impact the final product has on beings’ experiences. In the case of human creations, often, our minds are not on the right track when we think about new ideas. And, as a result, we create tools with uses that do not help us achieve what matters. I feel like humanity keeps building ships to hang out on the water next to a bay, but we never think of using them to sail the ocean.
Convenience, comfort, technology, and medical advancements; none of them equates to a better experience for beings. Think about it. Smartwatches, for example, make it very convenient to check your phone’s notifications directly on your wrist. But, is that a systemic improvement? Do innovations like that help us reduce the suffering of sentient containers at all? Medical innovations continue to extend our life expectancy. But do they make the quality of our lives any better? Do they alleviate any of the pains of being, such as our need for love, acceptance, and recognition? Let me ask you something:
What is best, to live a hundred years of an unfulfilling life or to make the experience of a short life so great people are satisfied even if they die at age forty?
Look, I am not trying to say it is wrong to make convenient devices that make our life more comfortable. Nor am I suggesting that technological or medical innovations are useless. What I am trying to say is that, so far, most of the uses we have given to both our creations and our efforts have missed the highest overarching goal we should be pursuing. The one we identified in Part III.
If we are to have one goal as inhabitants of this universe, the goal should be to improve the experience of beings.
We spend our lives chasing after marginal improvements or just obeying the commands of our genes. We are so focused on enhancing how we do a few things that we often forget to ask ourselves whether doing those things will take us a step forward in our quest to improving our experience as beings. We’ve been staring at the trees, but we’ve missed the forest. And now we’re lost, lost in the woods. But thankfully, there is a way out. And all it takes to find this way is to spend some time thinking before we even begin walking.
Let’s do that now. Let’s think and ask ourselves, how can we improve the experience of beings? Where are improvements needed most? Where is beings’ experience most miserable? What kind of systemic changes could we make there to fix what’s wrong?
What a great challenge we face: To make or set the foundations for a systemic improvement within the short span of our lives. So, whatever it is that we end up doing, we’d better do it toward the right direction.
Part V: Starting a Revolution
Note: If you thought about the questions at the end of the previous section, you might have come up with some answers. Your responses may be different from mine, and that’s okay. As long as we work toward our common goal as beings, we are part of the same team. Below, I will share with you the response I gave.
The Fight for Sentism
When I look around, I see a lot of injustice. People are abusing other people and harming each other. Amidst these injustices, however, there is one that stands out. It is humanity’s abuse of power against the weakest, the voiceless, the most defenseless of all beings: Non-human animals.
Every year, humans kill billions of animals for our consumption. Year after year, a count of animals higher than the entire population of humans on Earth are bred and raised under terrible conditions only to be mercilessly wiped out from existence in a fashion and scale that eclipses the brutality displayed during the Holocaust. Despite this, there is no humanity or compassion for the powerless victims of this horror tale. Many of our societies have matured to condemn slavery, look down on sexism, and prohibit racism. Yet, we have normalized the exploitation of non-human animals, and almost nobody questions the terrible manners in which we treat these beings. Many people are not even aware of how the food they consume is produced and brought to their tables. We have covered our cruelty with fog and grown numb to the suffering of beings who can experience reality much like we can and who, like us too, have an intense yearning to avoid unpleasant experiences.
You don’t need to like animals to respect their sentience. I, for instance, have to admit that I’m not particularly fond of any farm animal. But, that does not entitle me or anyone to torture them just for our culinary pleasure (humans can lead perfectly healthy diets without relying on animal-based products). When we recognize a person is capable of feeling pain, we try to avoid harming them unless we have a strong justification for doing otherwise. Why then do we disregard farm animal’s ability to experience and feel pain?
It saddens me deeply to see that most people, when made aware of all the harm we inflict upon non-human animals, do not make any change to their diets. Many joke about it and, although a few sometimes feel some empathy, they almost always choose to prioritize their convenience or taste preferences and ignore the suffering of the beings they consume. That must change.
The food consumption cycle of today is full of suffering. There’s so much injustice in the system, but we have become used to it and now think it is normal. That does not only have terrible consequences for the animals that we exploit but also for ourselves.
When we think it is okay to harm other beings, we become tolerant of abuses in general. We no longer see the importance of experience and forget that its quality determines the value of everything. We learn to give more importance to selfish interests and personal pleasure, even if that comes at the cost of others’ suffering. When convenience and comfort take precedence in our minds over respect and fairness, we remain indifferent to the injustice and suffering other beings have to endure, thinking that it’s okay as long as it doesn’t happen to us. We enter a mentality where the tools we create miss our highest goal as beings and, instead, take steps that lead us astray further into the woods. This complacent mindset can only result in the perpetuation of unfairness and extremely unpleasant experiences for all beings, especially those who can’t defend themselves.
Sentism, the philosophy that puts the quality of being’s experiences at the center of our consideration, is one of the most powerful weapons we can use to rebel. I’m convinced that every major social issue we have gone through was the result of not upholding sentism as our driving value. Think about it; the acceptance of slavery stems from the idea that differences in an irrelevant factor, like skin color, justify the exploitation of a human being. Nazism could only be possible because people believed another irrelevant factor like race or ethnicity justified the slaughter of fellow people. Historical sexism regarded women as less valuable simply based on the sex they were born with. Speciesists reassure people they’re entitled to kill and harm non-human animals for food because they’re ‘not us,’ and we only owe respect to people. All of these ideologies shrink the circle of respect and compassion to include only the dominant minorities. That has brought enormous amounts of suffering to all beings that found themselves outside of the circle throughout history. And, such tragedies will continue and repeat unless we finally learn about the only differentiating factor that matters: The ability to feel. If we had realized that white people deserved respect not because of being white but because they could experience, we would have understood black people, too, were just as capable of experiencing and, therefore, worthy of the same respect. This same logic applies to all the other issues I mentioned and will continue to apply to every future dilemma we may encounter.
I want to find a way to get humanity to learn to put sentism at the center of everything it does. I want people to evaluate the righteousness of our actions based on their impact on beings’ experiences and their contribution towards improvements that last. I want to create a just system where the weak can be weak and not be victims of abuse, a world where the powerful use their power for good, and not to perpetuate injustices.
So, to begin, I’ve decided to fix the mess with humanity’s exploitation and torturing of non-human animals. I am committed to creating a company that will implement systemic improvements to how humans produce, distribute, consume, and dispose of food.
Thus, Altum is born. Altum’s driving goal and ultimate purpose will be:
To eliminate negative experiences in the food consumption cycle while improving the experiences of those involved in making this possible.
Note: If you are curious to learn more about my vision for Altum and the more specific outcomes it will strive to produce, feel free to shoot me an email at mareszhar [at] gmail [dot] com. I’m also looking for collaborators to join me on this enterprise so, if you have any thoughts or would like to help, please reach out, I’d love to talk. For now, this marks the end of my answer.
Epilogue
In Part IV, I said that I didn’t think our experience as beings had improved much. Even after humans learned to reason, imagine, communicate, and create advanced tools, our condition remained somewhat unchanged. What I did not say back then was that, although our situation did not improve much, our position certainly did.
We may not have given our tools and intelligence the best uses but, thanks to the advancements we’ve made, we are now in a much better position to shift tracks and leverage technological advancements and other discoveries for the good of all beings. Think about it. What can a frog do to escape the survival game? What can it do to resist the will of its genes? How could it meet its primitive needs while also securing a good experience for itself? As Tim Urban noted, not much. A frog has no tools to escape its prison. It’s sad, but it doesn’t have any means to rebel against the unfair system in which it’s trapped. We, on the other hand, do. We have the tools and intelligence to improve not just our experience, but also that of all other beings. You do, too.
To make the most out of our tools, we need to think about what I call ‘The Guiding Questions’ more often. They are the compass that will set our feet in the right direction and help us find our way out of the woods. If you keep them in mind as you observe the actions you and other beings do or the events that take place in the environment you live in, they will help you see the world with new eyes and, hopefully, imbue you with purpose.
Guiding Questions
1. Where is beings’ experience most miserable?
2. What systemic changes need to be made to fix what’s wrong?
3. How can I make or set the foundations for these changes to take place?
If you think your skills and interests would be put to better use improving the experience of beings in an area that perhaps does not seem as urgent as others, that’s okay. Go wherever you can make the most out of what you’ve got. The quality of your experience is precious, too.
In the end, making sure that whatever it is that you end up doing takes us beings a step forward in the right direction is what matters most.
There’s so much that needs to be done and so much that you can do. If you spend enough time observing and abstracting, you will find it. You will discover what it is that you want to do, or better said, what it is that you’re convinced needs to be done. Once you know what that is, just do it (seriously, please do it).
Help us break free from this prison. Let’s work together to end the unfairness of the system we’re born into, subdue the commands of our genes, and find a way to neutralize our destructive impulses. You have a role in this movie, and your actions will influence its outcome. Pick up a permanent marker, and leave a trace on the whiteboard. A trace future generations and the rest of us can follow to finish the drawing. A drawing that, at last, portrays us having the type of experience we’ve always wanted.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” –Alice Walker
Footnotes
I’d like to thank Tim Urban and his article The Great Battle of Fire and Light for inspiring me to write this post and showing me, for the first time, a way to put into words the thoughts and ideas that had been revolving in my mind for so many years, waiting to come out. If you liked this article, I’d recommend you also check out Tim’s. He’s a much better writer than I am, and perhaps the illustrations he included will help reinforce your understanding of the ‘Genes vs. Beings’ struggle I described in the first parts of this article.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you very much for reading.
Courage,
Mares
