I want to share with everyone a passage from the opening of the movie The Gods Must be Crazy [1]. This silly 1980s movie provides a very oversimplified, idealized image of African Bushmen, but at the same time gets its label of modern westernized man spot-on. This excerpt from the film’s opening narration always makes me pause and consider the needless complexity of modern life:
“…Here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead, he adapted his environment to suit him.
So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But he didn’t know when to stop.
The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.
And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment.
For instance, if it’s Monday and 8:00 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings…and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 9:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 5 minutes…And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time…you adapt to new circumstances.
No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.”
Re-reading this part of the script really gets my mind a-brewing, thinking about all the wasteful, stress-inducing things we do to make life “easier”. More on this soon.
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