Posts » God Syndrome
Recently I have failed miserably by planting some of my seedlings too early. The day after frost happened and I lost some peppers and tomatoes. I cried that day as I put a lot of effort into nurturing them, but the truth is they both don’t grow naturally in 50°N, so I was rightfully taught a lesson by Nature.
Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about my failure in a greater scheme of things. We humans like to be in control, shape things according to our will, act as gods to “lesser” creatures by: exploiting and killing bred animals, planting monocrops while eradicating weeds with herbicides, using artificial fertilizers leaving soil depleted of resources, stealing honey from bees and feeding them back sugar so they can barely survive, just to name a few. We think we are so clever we can cheat Nature so it plays to our own rules.
We can only do it short-term, because we will be taught a lesson long-term.
There’s a saying I love: “the only constant in Nature is change”.
Humans don’t like change. Take global warming as an example. We are selfish, happy in our comfort zones, and we are not going to give things up unless that change threatens us personally. And by building those comfort zones we got lazy. We will more likely bend the reality than move an inch. There are 8 billion of us already, and we are way past a sustainable population size. We keep exploiting Nature to keep growing everything. Growth for the sake of growth it is.
But one day Nature will act as a god on us, as we don’t respect it. We are not on top. The Nature is.
I was taught a lesson, and it made me more modest than before. And I’m glad it happened.