Beginning or the End

Everything's been done. Everything's already been said. Nothing is truly new. It's all just a variant of things past.

As life keeps on ticking on, people keep on repeating the same chores day in and day out. Work, eat, sleep. But nothing is ever really done. No matter how much work people do, it's all futile in the end. They get money that's used for food and shelter, and the toys that make life "worth living" but nothing else. Humans have become so dependent upon their technologies that they wouldn't be able to survive if it all were to be wiped out tomorrow.

We may be intelligent. Highly evolved. Perhaps even spiritually advanced. But we are so tied up doing unimportant things that we've forgotten the basic needs of ourselves.

How many of us could start a fire without matches or any other man-made device? Or even grow crops to support our families? Build shelter? How about know how to bend wood to make a wheel? Make the cloth for clothing? Make thread? Shoes? Or even simpler: know which plants can be eaten that grow in the wild, and which can't? How about make brick? Make tools from metals?

These simple things required for all life on the planet have been outsourced to others. Efficient, and allowing people to become more advanced - perhaps. But they aren't even taught anymore. People aren't even aware of the warning signs of a volcano erupting, even a tsunami -- if they were hundreds-thousands wouldn't die what seems to be every time one happens (extenuating circumstances being excluded).

But what will happen when we have a massive volcanic eruption, a so-called super eruption, that sends the planet into massive cooling -- or even an asteroid or comet hitting the planet? And yes, I say when, for it will happen. It has before, it will again. We'll be cut off from our satellites causing a lot of our technology to stop working, or at the least lose a lot of functioning. Crops will start to die off, as well as animals. Power systems will fail taking out heating and cooling systems to billions of people. And what will people do then?

We haven't been trained to know what to do. There's no foraging classes taught that are required. No "keeping warm without power". We can't even imagine living without power. My grandparents didn't live without power, even my great-grandparents had power for most of their lives. Take that away, and we're lost. All work stops, people panic, food spoils. A simple 72 hour power outage can cause a family to lose most of their food. But it's all due to technological advances and people's fast work schedules. Everything has to be "now" or "five minutes ago". Canned foods make up a small portion of many households, replaced in favor of frozen foods -- yet these foods are impervious to power outages. Many can even be eaten without being reheated.

Canning itself is a modern technology too, simple in it's implementation -- yet how many people now even know how to do it?

Everything we have that makes us so advanced will be our downfall. The beginning of every new technology, while a wondrous achievement, just adds to our loss of knowledge. For every advancement, we take steps backward in the simplest of things. And one day, it'll be the collapse of our civilization -- the human civilization.