Can We Achieve A Perspective That Lets Us Look Beyond Our Needs?

Needs make us who we are, but is that all we are capable of?

Photo by Krys Amon

For 95% of our species’ existence, we didn’t farm, we didn’t live in towns, not even villages. Instead, we hunted and gathered, swiftly moving from spot to spot, in close communities of versatile fighters.

It is easy to think that, at some point, we realised our greatness, our potential, and came together to build something bigger, to transcend who we were and become who we are today. It simply isn’t the case.

On the other hand, a more critical view of humanity could tempt us to argue that we merely jumped at the opportunity of agriculture as the climate became warmer, but even this is debatable since spells of warmer climate had already been available to generations of humans in the hundreds of thousands of years we had been around. The circumstances might have been ripe, but they had been ripe before, and we had ignored them.

Yet, about 10,000 years ago, we started farming. I don’t think we looked that far ahead and started farming intending to build civilisations a couple of thousand years later. Arguably, civilised life is more comfortable than a simple farmer’s life — dependent on changing weather and susceptible to constant raids — but farming wasn’t a…