I recently watched an 'inspirational' video where the content creator stated that we are like gazelle, and that to find success you should be a lion. This analogy is limited in its very nature of classifying us as a species in such a simplistic way.
After all, how does the lion think?
Does it spend days/weeks/years building strategies to trap and limit the pray to build a vast store of carcasses that it could never eat in a million years?
Does the lion withhold resources from the hyena pack to maintain a position of dominance over the whole prairie?
The answer is no!
A lion understands instinctively how to hunt and maintain balance in its environment. All of the traits I listed above are human predatory behavior. We are both a social animal and a predatory one - with the lack of any other creatures to enact those instincts on, we now turn it on each other.
The validity of this type of metaphor, that places humans in a position of a predator or prey animal is far too simplistic. I've seen that type of 'so called' motivational writing all over the internet for a long time and what it generally comes down to is providing simple concepts of success and failure that are erroneous, usually with the writer painting themselves as a lion who has all the answers of how you can be one too.
Some people live a life that is wonderful, beautiful and meaningful, but not successful, by your definition, or many other peoples definition.
The car, the house, the job, the 401K, the crypto cash stack, the motivational blog, the Instagram fame... all definitions of success.
But there are other definitions - those who tread lightly upon this planet and do NO harm, that is a successful existence. Someone who limits their impact upon this planet, at this point in time when it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are destroying it, is one of the most successful human beings.
We all live, and then we die... and then we are no more.
You cannot take your wealth with you, and more importantly your achievements mean nothing unless they improve things for people other than you. And, unless things are improved through your actions without harming others as a consequence, as big business so often fails to do, all your successes are hollow in my opinion.
You will often hear the Bezos' of this world say things like 'I create jobs and industry where before there was none. I put food in peoples mouths.'
Sure, at the cost of keeping people in poverty through the process of persistent adherence to market forces to maximize profit. The currency of misery is always the last thing people like that want to talk about.
But back to the gazelle and lion analogy.
Here's the thing. The reality is, if you are going to believe the narrative of someone telling you about what success is, you are buying into their story. Similarly, people buy into society's idea of success, or those people around them, or their family... whoever is selling you their idea of success, they will all tell you that this is reality.
It's only their reality, and it is something they are selling!
As long as you live well and do as little harm as possible, everything else is just buying in to conditioning.
Move outside of other peoples narrative, and you make your own story.
Intelligence is the key out of this uroboros of self-destruction that we, as a species, perpetuate. Our continued repeating of history, stems not from an immutable compulsion of nature - as some philosophers would have it - but from humans trying to act as predatory animals in a world where the only prey we haven't completely subdued is our fellow human beings. This is why we war.
We are like a cat batting at it's own reflection in a mirror and wondering why it's paws are hurting.
There is no point, from a survival point of view for war!
Yet, it's a business that some humans thrive on, and it all comes down to competition, and our need for competition due to our defunct human predatory nature.
As with the lion and the gazelle analogy which is limited by its very nature as it buys into only what has gone before, and not what we have the potential to ultimately BE.
We often compete because that is our PAST instinctual behavior. Thinking outside of this box is essential for us as a species to find an evolution of thought, which is the only way to evolve the human animal moving forwards.
We evolve, or we stagnate... or we destroy the planet that sustains us!
Decentralization and crypto gives us a chance at a different dynamic, it is still a competitive dynamic, but it has the potential to remove a certain amount of the negative influence of power.
I always envisioned crypto as the first of many technologies to fragment old structures of power by completely removing any chance of centralized control.
Decentralization has the potential to remove the tools that humans use to steer everything they build toward their own self interest, including political structures. I don't care if this would cause chaos in the short term as the long term is much more important. Changing behaviors on a global scale is the only thing that will save us, and our planet, from ourselves. I think that decentralization, and the technologies that emerge from it, could be a vehicle to achieve fundamental evolutionary change.
Thanks for reading my thoughts 🙂🌿
The images used in this post was created by me using GIMP photo editor using a variety of creative commons images. Sources to credit: 1 2 3.
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