What Are We Made For?
Science x Literature is my favorite overthinking genre
The Germans have a word ‘umwelt’ meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems. Simply put, every single one of us sees the world from the perception of our lived experiences. I think the Germans have a beautiful thing going on there.
It really does answer an important question about why the world is the way it is and why people behave the way they do.
A human sees a lamp post, a dog sees something to pee on.
A bee sees a source of food; a griever cannot stand flowers.
A bear mom sleeps to survive, a human mom must wake up no matter what, so her family survives.
We see what our life experiences allow us to see. We perceive what our experiences teach us. We fight what we fear. We covet what we cannot have. We imagine our victories in connection to our losses, our ambitions in connection to our necessities, our dreams shelved away in favor of bills, until the exuberance of youth and the pages where we wrote the dreams down, both fade away.
Some choose silence as their weapon because they have met with cruel words and actions all their lives.
Some choose words as their weapon because they’re cursed with having to straighten the record repeatedly.
Some check out and float, because being involved takes too much of them, from them.
Some engage with unmatched intensity, lest everything spiral into pieces.
For 5 seconds, I believed it would be incredibly lonely being a part of this kind of a world. I am simultaneously awestruck at how many of us go through the same human experiences and must, therefore, see the world in similar ways but the reality of our world is not that at all. I guess, what I am getting at is that even when the same kind of weather conditions create a snowfall everywhere, each snowflake makes its own unique patterns, and it is pretty much the same for humans too.
Maybe this is why we are all suckers for stories where people rise above their environments and go on to achieve something far beyond the imaginations of their existence.
Do you, like me, struggle to make and keep friends? Would you consider having an AI friend? (For the record, my answer is a vehement NO). Mark Zuckerberg seems to think that AI friends are the future but honestly, AI doesn’t have the capacity to be as unhinged as my real-life friends. But since we live in the creator economy and ghoulish behavior gets a lot of attention, I hope everyone enjoys AI experts rebutting Mark on AI friends.
Mark Zuckerberg Thinks AI 'Friends' Can Solve the Loneliness Crisis. Here's What AI Experts Think.