Eat. Love. Stay warm. Try not to get eaten by wolves.
Coffee with Elder G
First – Happy Mothers’ Day!
But then Elder G and I get into a little deeper discussion.
G, why is life so complicated? We’ve gone from village life to having
- tax codes
- passwords
- algorithmically optimized outrage
- health insurance companies determining who lives and who dies
- twelve kinds of USB cable
- “your call is important to us”
- a banking system where ownership, access, taxation, survivorship, and beneficiary status are all different things somehow
As Elder G puts it:
Part of the complication comes from scale. A small tribe can run on memory and trust. A nation of 340 million people runs on forms, procedures, and rules because somewhere, at some point, somebody tried something astonishingly dumb and forced the creation of subsection 14(b)(iii). Civilization is basically an enormous coral reef of reactions to prior disasters.
And yet, beneath the bureaucratic lasagna, the important things remain oddly primitive:
- a good meal
- a person you trust
- laughter in a kitchen
- music at night
- gardens after rain
- someone saying “I’m glad you’re here”
WLBOTT: I think part of the problem that our base primate urges (especially dominance and aggression) now have modern tools and weapons and technology to make life much harder than it needs to be.
Elder G: The strange thing is that despite all the machinery, humans still seem happiest in moments that would be recognizable to people thousands of years ago: a shared meal, a story, a song, a hand on your shoulder, somebody laughing so hard they snort tea through their nose at a ridiculous WLBOTT sign reading: COMPLIANCE IS HARMONY.
