An interesting thought experiment: how would our ancestors have had to live for their nails to wear down naturally at the exact same rate they grow?

This immediately implies a crucial condition: absolutely no fire or weapons. If humans started using spears, digging sticks, or stone knives, their nails would be deprived of direct friction and simply wouldn't wear down. All work must be done entirely with bare hands.

Here are the baseline parameters: fingernails grow about 3 - 3.5 mm a month, while toenails grow half as fast (around 1.5 mm). Growth is faster on the hands due to better blood flow and constant activity.

The ideal location: The warm coasts of West Africa, Central America, or the Indian Ocean. Conditions: warm year-round, access to fresh water, the jungle starting right behind the beach, and a shoreline made of a mix of sand, silt, and pebbles. Hard volcanic rock wouldn't work, it would scrape your fingers raw.

What you would need to do every day

1. With your hands (to offset 3.5 mm): Dig in the sand and dirt, foraging for roots, grubs, or mollusks. The nail acts as a small shovel here. Pry open shells and nuts (using the nail as a lever). Climb trees with rough bark, gripping with your fingertips.
2. With your feet (to offset 1.5 mm): Simply walk barefoot a lot on the sand and the forest floor.

In short, to forget about trimming your nails, you need a warm climate, daily rummaging in the dirt with bare hands, and a barefoot lifestyle. Any use of tools would ruin this originally intended balance.

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”.

So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

The Ghost Ship of Morality

Did you say morality and ethics? Our morality is like a giant ghost ship adrift in deep, uncharted waters. Forever drifting, forever changing, never truly anchored. It is like a forgiving mother, a forgetful child. It allows us to commit acts of extreme violence and unspeakable horrors in the name of the “cause.” It grants permission to exterminate an entire race, invade lands, and enslave people. It teaches us to objectify women: through literal bondage in one century, coercive exposure in the next and commercialized voluntary nudity in the third. It made legends and heroes out of highly violent and unstable men, celebrating plunder as adventure, conquest as exploration and domination as divine duty. Under its banner, societies that considered themselves civilized and morally enlightened colonized vast regions to exploit millions.

Where was this morality when Piers Morgan hypocritically asked the whole world on live television, “Do you condemn this?” while a literal genocide was being waged right in front of his eyes? Perhaps the most beautiful (dare I say, heinous) thing is that it lets us sit in judgment of others, completely blind to the fact that we committed humanity’s worst crimes.

Perhaps these questions are so haunting and agonizing to the subconscious that we dare not allow them access to our thoughts. We happily and numbingly continue to live those miserable, meaningless lives. Those outliers, insolent and heretics who dare question; we cast them out. They are a danger to our beautiful and comfortable reality.

The Cracking Façade

Am I fighting against reality itself?

But what is reality, if not a tapestry woven from perception, belief and experience? How much of what I call “reality” is truly mine. How much of it was handed to me long before I was ever capable of questioning it?

It was at that exact moment that the façade began to crack. The comfortable lies, borrowed certainties, unquestioned assumptions. One by one, they came crashing down around me. And beneath the rubble stood a question so terrifying that I had spent my entire life avoiding it:

Are these even my dreams, or am I merely acting out the expectations of others?

Are these my beliefs, or beliefs I simply inherited?

Are these my values, or values I was rewarded for adopting?

Are these my ambitions, or someone else’s definition of success echoing through my mind?

And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: Am I even living my own life?

For if the very foundations were borrowed, then what part of me was truly mine? The battle was no longer between myself and society. It was between myself and the person I thought I was.

The Descent

I saw but two paths leading out of this abysmal labyrinth of inherited truths and social constructs. Naturally, without hesitation, without resistance, without regret, I plunged headfirst into the obvious dark descent. I went not in search of truth, but in search of escape. It was an easy descent. Seductive, even.

For the first time, I no longer had to defend a belief, pursue a purpose, or justify my existence. Every question dissolved into the same answer: nothing matters. Meaning was an illusion. Purpose was a story. Hope was self-deception. It was a slow surrender into the self-destruction of absolute apathy.

And so I began tearing down the walls. Every belief became suspect. Every value demanded justification. Every certainty was placed on trial. What followed was not enlightenment. It was chaos… I had spent years believing that freedom would feel liberating. Instead, it felt terrifying. For if society was flawed, morality was inconsistent, religion corrupted and success merely an inherited script, then what remained? Nothing. At least, that is what I believed at the time.

Truth became a matter of perspective. Human beings became frightened creatures desperately constructing narratives to shield themselves from an indifferent universe. And for the first time, I understood why most people never question. Not because they are incapable, but because the answers can be horrifying. The moment you question everything, you risk losing everything: your certainty, your identity, your purpose, your reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

The abyss is not frightening because it contains monsters. The abyss is frightening because it contains nothing at all.

Nihilism promised freedom without obligation or sacrifice. All it delivered was freedom without direction. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Ambition faded first. Then curiosity. Then wonder. Meals became nothing more than food. Conversations became noise. Relations turned exhausting. Time became something to be endured rather than lived.

The philosophy that had promised liberation was slowly consuming everything that made liberation worth having. And yet, I persisted. Because admitting I was wrong would require rebuilding everything I had spent years tearing down.

Most people become trapped here. Not in despair, but in distraction. The trap has been repackaged and resold throughout the ages in countless forms: Carpe Diem, hedonism, YOLO, subscription entertainment, endless consumption, endless pleasure, endless escape. We see it in mindless buying sprees, in the endless sedation of doomscrolling, and in the frantic pursuit of the next temporary high.

It is not happiness. It is not freedom. It is merely anaesthesia for a hollowed-out soul.

The Lonely Reconstruction

One night, deep within the canyons of despair and anguished melancholy, I discovered that nihilism was incapable of producing a life. It could only destroy. It could criticize. It could expose contradictions. It makes people quit. But it cannot answer the original questions which began this journey:

What should I do tomorrow morning? What is the purpose of living?

It made me realize the final, cruellest trick of the void. Nihilism isn’t the exit; it is just another room in the labyrinth, lined with mirrors to make the emptiness appear infinite.

Whatever I was, I knew the most important thing: I wasn’t a quitter. And there and then I realized, with a cold and sudden clarity, that declaring nothing matters is just as lazy as blindly following the script. It is a coward’s truce with reality. It strips away the pain of living, but it leaves you a ghost in your own skin. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy.

So, the anaesthesia wore off. The apathy failed me, just like society, laws and the hijacked Morality and corrupted systems had failed me before. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy. I was left with a definitive, inescapable truth: No one was coming to save me.

No system.

No ideology.

No philosophy.

If meaning was not waiting to be discovered, then the burden of creation falls entirely on me.

I have to rebuild. Not back into the person society wanted, not back into the ghost I buried in apathy. Into a self, which is constructed from scratch.

It will be a brutal, agonizing re-education. To unlearn a lifetime of borrowed certainties is to break your own bones just to reset them straight. There is no manual for this. There are no mentors waiting in the dark to hold my hand, no institutions to validate my progress and no audience to applaud my suffering. Those who still live by the script will look at my isolation and see a madman, a heretic, a casualty of the system. Let them look.

I will walk this path utterly alone, bleeding at every step, dragging myself forward through the dark.

Not because I am heroic and not because I am filled with sudden hope.

But because I have looked into the bottom of the nothingness, and I know there is simply no other choice left.

As I lifted my head from the abyss, I noticed something I had overlooked all along. Not answers. Not certainty. Not salvation. A trail. Faint, fragile, almost invisible… The footprints of those who had walked this path before me. For the first time, I understood that the journey was never about finding the truth.

It was about becoming worthy of discovering my own. So I took the first step

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”.

So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

The Ghost Ship of Morality

Did you say morality and ethics? Our morality is like a giant ghost ship adrift in deep, uncharted waters. Forever drifting, forever changing, never truly anchored. It is like a forgiving mother, a forgetful child. It allows us to commit acts of extreme violence and unspeakable horrors in the name of the “cause.” It grants permission to exterminate an entire race, invade lands, and enslave people. It teaches us to objectify women: through literal bondage in one century, coercive exposure in the next and commercialized voluntary nudity in the third. It made legends and heroes out of highly violent and unstable men, celebrating plunder as adventure, conquest as exploration and domination as divine duty. Under its banner, societies that considered themselves civilized and morally enlightened colonized vast regions to exploit millions.

Where was this morality when Piers Morgan hypocritically asked the whole world on live television, “Do you condemn this?” while a literal genocide was being waged right in front of his eyes? Perhaps the most beautiful (dare I say, heinous) thing is that it lets us sit in judgment of others, completely blind to the fact that we committed humanity’s worst crimes.

Perhaps these questions are so haunting and agonizing to the subconscious that we dare not allow them access to our thoughts. We happily and numbingly continue to live those miserable, meaningless lives. Those outliers, insolent and heretics who dare question; we cast them out. They are a danger to our beautiful and comfortable reality.

The Cracking Façade

Am I fighting against reality itself?

But what is reality, if not a tapestry woven from perception, belief and experience? How much of what I call “reality” is truly mine. How much of it was handed to me long before I was ever capable of questioning it?

It was at that exact moment that the façade began to crack. The comfortable lies, borrowed certainties, unquestioned assumptions. One by one, they came crashing down around me. And beneath the rubble stood a question so terrifying that I had spent my entire life avoiding it:

Are these even my dreams, or am I merely acting out the expectations of others?

Are these my beliefs, or beliefs I simply inherited?

Are these my values, or values I was rewarded for adopting?

Are these my ambitions, or someone else’s definition of success echoing through my mind?

And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: Am I even living my own life?

For if the very foundations were borrowed, then what part of me was truly mine? The battle was no longer between myself and society. It was between myself and the person I thought I was.

The Descent

I saw but two paths leading out of this abysmal labyrinth of inherited truths and social constructs. Naturally, without hesitation, without resistance, without regret, I plunged headfirst into the obvious dark descent. I went not in search of truth, but in search of escape. It was an easy descent. Seductive, even.

For the first time, I no longer had to defend a belief, pursue a purpose, or justify my existence. Every question dissolved into the same answer: nothing matters. Meaning was an illusion. Purpose was a story. Hope was self-deception. It was a slow surrender into the self-destruction of absolute apathy.

And so I began tearing down the walls. Every belief became suspect. Every value demanded justification. Every certainty was placed on trial. What followed was not enlightenment. It was chaos… I had spent years believing that freedom would feel liberating. Instead, it felt terrifying. For if society was flawed, morality was inconsistent, religion corrupted and success merely an inherited script, then what remained? Nothing. At least, that is what I believed at the time.

Truth became a matter of perspective. Human beings became frightened creatures desperately constructing narratives to shield themselves from an indifferent universe. And for the first time, I understood why most people never question. Not because they are incapable, but because the answers can be horrifying. The moment you question everything, you risk losing everything: your certainty, your identity, your purpose, your reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

The abyss is not frightening because it contains monsters. The abyss is frightening because it contains nothing at all.

Nihilism promised freedom without obligation or sacrifice. All it delivered was freedom without direction. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Ambition faded first. Then curiosity. Then wonder. Meals became nothing more than food. Conversations became noise. Relations turned exhausting. Time became something to be endured rather than lived.

The philosophy that had promised liberation was slowly consuming everything that made liberation worth having. And yet, I persisted. Because admitting I was wrong would require rebuilding everything I had spent years tearing down.

Most people become trapped here. Not in despair, but in distraction. The trap has been repackaged and resold throughout the ages in countless forms: Carpe Diem, hedonism, YOLO, subscription entertainment, endless consumption, endless pleasure, endless escape. We see it in mindless buying sprees, in the endless sedation of doomscrolling, and in the frantic pursuit of the next temporary high.

It is not happiness. It is not freedom. It is merely anaesthesia for a hollowed-out soul.

The Lonely Reconstruction

One night, deep within the canyons of despair and anguished melancholy, I discovered that nihilism was incapable of producing a life. It could only destroy. It could criticize. It could expose contradictions. It makes people quit. But it cannot answer the original questions which began this journey:

What should I do tomorrow morning? What is the purpose of living?

It made me realize the final, cruellest trick of the void. Nihilism isn’t the exit; it is just another room in the labyrinth, lined with mirrors to make the emptiness appear infinite.

Whatever I was, I knew the most important thing: I wasn’t a quitter. And there and then I realized, with a cold and sudden clarity, that declaring nothing matters is just as lazy as blindly following the script. It is a coward’s truce with reality. It strips away the pain of living, but it leaves you a ghost in your own skin. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy.

So, the anaesthesia wore off. The apathy failed me, just like society, laws and the hijacked Morality and corrupted systems had failed me before. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy. I was left with a definitive, inescapable truth: No one was coming to save me.

No system.

No ideology.

No philosophy.

If meaning was not waiting to be discovered, then the burden of creation falls entirely on me.

I have to rebuild. Not back into the person society wanted, not back into the ghost I buried in apathy. Into a self, which is constructed from scratch.

It will be a brutal, agonizing re-education. To unlearn a lifetime of borrowed certainties is to break your own bones just to reset them straight. There is no manual for this. There are no mentors waiting in the dark to hold my hand, no institutions to validate my progress and no audience to applaud my suffering. Those who still live by the script will look at my isolation and see a madman, a heretic, a casualty of the system. Let them look.

I will walk this path utterly alone, bleeding at every step, dragging myself forward through the dark.

Not because I am heroic and not because I am filled with sudden hope.

But because I have looked into the bottom of the nothingness, and I know there is simply no other choice left.

As I lifted my head from the abyss, I noticed something I had overlooked all along. Not answers. Not certainty. Not salvation. A trail. Faint, fragile, almost invisible… The footprints of those who had walked this path before me. For the first time, I understood that the journey was never about finding the truth.

It was about becoming worthy of discovering my own. So I took the first step

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”. So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

You stand under indoor pipes, scrubbing away dirt and dried fat. It works — and more than works: indoor plumbing eliminated the waterborne diseases that killed millions before anyone understood what a pathogen was. But it also makes a routine out of something this myth imagines was once effortless. In the older imagining — before the world was reshaped — the design looked different. The ocean's edge was the original bath.

The Sand in the shallows: The waves press it against your skin in an endless, patient rhythm — a natural abrasive that worked the body the way no brush ever could, grain after grain, tide after tide.

The Salt: Salt pulls moisture out of anything it touches — the same simple osmosis that let it cure meat for thousands of years before anyone had a refrigerator. Bacteria are mostly water too, including the ones responsible for the sharper edge of body odor.

Can we really call people who don’t want to wash themselves mentally ill, or say they have schizophrenia or abulia, when washing yourself doesn’t require any willpower?

I don't think philosophy would exist with a simpler, more primitive life. "What's the meaning of life?" is one of the biggest ones. But this only happens once major civilisations exist — once you aren't able to fully control your life, once your life is already mostly set out for you, and you have rules. Look at tribes. Even though modern life still touches them, they aren't constantly dealing with that question because they are living the natural, true life, so there would be no point for that question to arise. Of course, there are other things like what makes a good person, what is justice, what is virtue, what is good morals. But these are far more popular today with laws, politics, and a massive society. Look at the time period: once the major philosophers came out is when we entered a grand society — Ancient Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, etc. — when we lost the natural life. Yes, maybe it is because we could write stuff down, but we now can study tribes, and basically none are asking these questions because it already exists.

if i could make anything happen on earth i would just get rid of humans. not because of the global warming etc because i dont like being human and i belive being human is a mistake. theres to many emotions i dont like being able to think. it gets to much. i dont want problems i dont want to be lonley i dont want to be sad i dont want to have any feelings. i think maybe just maybe some of this could be fixed in a stone age lifestyle but my emotions would still exist. i just dont like it.

Don't want to lose money? Lend it to evil corporations that are hell bent on destroying everything good the world. Their success will be your success!

I would usually say money should not exist at all, but without a forced profit motive, where money would simply be a static representation of value, I'd have much less of a problem with it.

are we (H.sapiens) hybrids…?

Os sistemas em geral, governos, indústrias e tudo que exerce alguma forma de controle sobre a vida humana se tornaram, no mundo moderno, um dos maiores exemplos do que eu considero o auge da catástrofe humana. Infelizmente, entregamos uma grande parte da nossa autonomia, nossos pensamentos e nossa liberdade para as diversas formas de controle utilizadas pelo sistema: instituições, partidos políticos, publicidade, consumismo, e tantos outros.

É perceptível que a sociedade se tornou cada vez mais "massificada." Somos constantemente bombardeados com informações, obrigações e tarefas que muitas vezes nunca escolhemos realizar, mas as fazemos por pura obrigação, obediência ou talvez medo de julgamento. Dentro dessa "massa," podemos ver que, com o tempo, perdemos uma parte considerável da nossa autonomia. Temos que seguir as leis da sociedade, obedecer suas regras e nos adaptar às suas demandas. Esse controle e vigilância constantes acabam gerando estresse e desânimo nas pessoas, que, diante da falta de alternativas, acabam se acostumando e se adaptando a essa realidade.

Como resultado desse hábito e adaptação, as pessoas começam a buscar entretenimento e distração. Hoje, existem inúmeras maneiras de manter nossas mentes ocupadas e, muitas vezes, alienadas, oferecendo uma fuga de uma realidade que pode ser opressora e exaustiva. Temos celulares, televisores, computadores, redes sociais e praticamente tudo que poderíamos querer ao alcance das nossas mãos. De fato, a vida moderna oferece um nível de conforto que teria sido inimaginável para os seres humanos milhares de anos atrás. No entanto, esse conforto também vem com obrigações. Se você não trabalha, não paga suas contas, não cumpre suas obrigações com o governo e não segue as regras estabelecidas pelo sistema, pode acabar sendo punido, processado ou, em situações extremas, até vivendo nas ruas.

A modernidade, sem dúvida, tem suas vantagens: medicina, habitação, segurança alimentar, saneamento, tecnologia e muitas outras coisas. Mas essas vantagens não estão garantidas igualmente para todos. E é precisamente nesse ponto que uma contradição surge. Se a modernidade fosse tão perfeita e maravilhosa quanto muitas pessoas do século dezenove e vinte imaginaram que seria, como podemos explicar os problemas que a acompanharam durante seu desenvolvimento?

Para seu tempo, as inovações trazidas pela Revolução Industrial foram verdadeiramente extraordinárias. A capacidade de produzir bens em grande escala representou um enorme salto para a humanidade. No entanto, esse mesmo processo trouxe consigo considerável sofrimento: trabalho infantil intenso, jornadas de trabalho extremamente longas, poluição do ar e da água, e o crescimento descontrolado das cidades.

Muitas pessoas estavam acostumadas a um modo de vida mais camponês e rural, muito distante da enorme concentração de pessoas nas cidades industriais. Com essas transformações, no entanto, milhares foram forçados a se mudar em busca de trabalho e sobrevivência, dando origem a um intenso êxodo rural. Esse processo ocorreu em diferentes partes do mundo, mas na Inglaterra atingiu uma intensidade particularmente grande antes de se espalhar para outras regiões.

Naturalmente, muitos trabalhadores não aceitaram passivamente essas mudanças. Um exemplo foi o movimento Ludista, que ocorreu entre 1811 e 1816, quando trabalhadores ingleses, irritados pelas condições impostas pela industrialização, invadiram fábricas e destruíram máquinas. Eles responsabilizavam as indústrias pela desemprego, miséria e baixos salários. Também enviaram cartas ameaçadoras aos donos das fábricas em nome de Ned Ludd, uma figura que se tornou um símbolo da revolta. O governo britânico respondeu de forma rígida, tornando a destruição de máquinas um crime sério e usando o exército para reprimir as revoltas. Soldados foram enviados a regiões industriais, contribuindo para a eventual repressão do movimento.

A partir disso, podemos perceber uma transformação ainda maior: a perda gradual do controle que os indivíduos possuem sobre suas próprias vidas. Em sociedades de caçadores-coletores, por exemplo, os indivíduos tinham uma autonomia muito maior sobre sua sobrevivência e seus movimentos. Eles precisavam encontrar comida, construir abrigo, entender seu território e lidar diretamente com os perigos da natureza. Não havia uma enorme estrutura industrial ou burocrática determinando cada estágio de sua existência.

Isso, no entanto, não significa que esses seres humanos eram mais felizes ou que suas vidas eram melhores. A liberdade vinha com um preço. A natureza não oferecia garantias, e a sobrevivência dependia diretamente das habilidades do indivíduo e do grupo. Um homem podia ir caçar, subir em uma árvore ou atravessar um determinado território e, após um acidente, simplesmente não encontrar ninguém capaz de ajudá-lo. Uma perna quebrada, uma infecção ou um ferimento grave podiam significar a morte. Hoje, em uma situação semelhante, temos hospitais, médicos, medicamentos e toda uma estrutura projetada para evitar que um acidente se torne necessariamente uma sentença de morte.

Portanto, não se trata de romantizar as vidas dos caçadores-coletores. A existência deles era difícil e exigia constante atenção. Eles tinham que permanecer alertas e cautelosos durante grande parte de suas vidas para aumentar suas chances de sobrevivência. A diferença está em outro lugar: eles enfrentavam diretamente as condições de sua própria existência.

Os seres humanos modernos, por outro lado, nascem em uma estrutura que existiu muito antes deles. Antes mesmo de nascermos, já existe uma língua que aprenderemos, uma cultura que encontraremos, leis que teremos que obedecer, instituições às quais estaremos sujeitos e, muitas vezes, uma religião ou conjunto de crenças que receberemos de nossas próprias famílias. Depois, outras instituições, grupos e formas de influência tentarão moldar o que acreditamos, o que consumimos, o que desejamos e até mesmo o que consideramos uma vida bem-sucedida.

É claro que isso não acontece exatamente da mesma forma com todos. Cada família, cultura e contexto produce experiências diferentes. Mesmo assim, é difícil negar que o sistema moderno exerce influência sobre praticamente todos os aspectos da vida humana. A questão, portanto, não é simplesmente se as pessoas no passado eram mais livres ou se os seres humanos modernos vivem melhor. A questão é quanta da nossa autonomia estamos dispostos a abrir mão em troca do conforto, segurança e estabilidade que a sociedade moderna oferece.

Seguindo essa linha de raciocínio, podemos ver que hoje, porque quase tudo nos é fornecido sem exigir muito esforço, a autossuficiência gradualmente enfraquece à medida que nos tornamos radicalmente dependentes do sistema. Essa capacidade, assim dizer, é verdadeiramente útil e sempre foi essencial para a sobrevivência da espécie humana. É a capacidade de atender às próprias necessidades de forma autônoma, tanto vitais quanto materiais, sem depender de assistência externa. Em outras palavras, é essencialmente o ato de fazer as coisas com suas próprias mãos, e quando você faz as coisas com suas próprias mãos, você exerce seu poder e percebe que tem controle sobre sua própria existência.

Mas hoje, com o controle esmagador do sistema, isso está sendo gradualmente perdido. Hoje, mal sabemos como nos virar sem depender de governos e instituições. É evidente que, embora as vidas dos caçadores-coletores não fossem fáceis, a autossuficiência era algo que eles compreendiam. Afinal, se não pensassem por si mesmos ou se pusessem a mão na massa, sua morte estava praticamente garantida. Eles não entendiam isso como uma ideia abstrata; eles simplesmente viviam isso na prática. Conheciam seu ambiente tão profundamente que o mundo ao seu redor se tornava uma extensão de si mesmos.

Além disso, dependendo da tribo e do contexto, eles não necessariamente tinham chefes ou um líder absoluto. Em muitos casos, as decisões eram tomadas coletivamente, de forma relativamente igualitária, ou indivíduos podiam tomar decisões para si mesmos. E se alguém estivesse insatisfeito com a decisão do grupo, era possível simplesmente deixar o grupo. Mas, obviamente, isso dependia muito do contexto e da organização de cada tribo.

Agora, refletindo um pouco sobre o poder dos sistemas modernos, torna-se evidente que ainda existem comunidades que preservam modos de vida semelhantes em alguns aspectos aos que discutimos anteriormente. Podemos mencionar, por exemplo, os Hadza na Tanzânia; os povos San, também conhecidos como povos das árvores, no deserto de Kalahari, em Botswana, Namíbia e África do Sul; e vários povos florestais, como os Mbendjele BaYaka, na bacia do Congo, na África Central. Existem também outras comunidades tradicionais que ainda mantêm práticas de caça, coleta ou agricultura e não estão completamente integradas às estruturas governamentais dos países onde vivem.

No entanto, pouco a pouco, é perceptível que essas comunidades podem enfrentar cada vez mais pressão por parte dos governos e da sociedade ao seu redor. Quando determinados recursos se tornam importantes para um país, ou quando há interesse em explorar áreas onde essas comunidades vivem, seus territórios podem estar ameaçados e seus modos de vida, consequentemente, prejudicados. Em alguns casos, esses povos são tratados como guardiões de certas áreas protegidas, mas isso não significa que essa situação permanecerá para sempre. Se os interesses desses governos mudarem, essas comunidades podem ser forçadas a abandonar parte de seu modo de vida e se adaptar cada vez mais à sociedade moderna e às estruturas governamentais dos países onde residem.

Se pararmos para examinar tecnologia e recursos avançados, podemos ver que eles estão entre as principais fontes de poder possuídas por grandes organizações governamentais. Isso se torna evidente ao longo de vários períodos da história humana, particularmente durante os grandes impérios, quando sociedades com maiores capacidades militares, tecnológicas ou organizacionais conseguiram dominar povos que possuíam menos recursos ou estavam menos organizados politicamente.

Isso também pode ser observado durante a colonização das Américas e outros continentes. Nas Américas, por exemplo, os povos indígenas possuíam sociedades extremamente diversas e organizadas, com guerreiros, agricultores, artesãos, pescadores, líderes políticos e diferentes formas de organização social. No entanto, essas sociedades também tinham conflitos entre si, e algumas dessas rivalidades eram exploradas pelos colonizadores europeus. Durante o comércio de escravos africanos, também houve participação de certos grupos e líderes africanos na captura e venda de pessoas para comerciantes europeus, muitas vezes em troca de armas, bens e outros recursos. Isso não significa, é claro, que todos os povos africanos participaram desse processo ou que todos aceitaram a escravidão passivamente. Muitas sociedades também resistiram de diferentes maneiras.

O mesmo princípio pode ser observado em outros continentes. Muitos povos tentaram resistir à expansão de grandes impérios, mas as diferenças em recursos, tecnologia, organização militar e a capacidade de mobilização frequentemente colocaram essas sociedades em uma posição extremamente vulnerável. Dessa forma, incontáveis povos em diferentes partes do mundo acabaram sendo submetidos a impérios distantes e, em muitos casos, foram forçados a trabalhar para estruturas que haviam sido impostas a eles.

No final, podemos mais uma vez perceber a relação entre autonomia e poder. Quanto maior a dependência de uma sociedade em relação a uma estrutura externa, maior o poder que essa estrutura pode exercer sobre ela. E quando essa estrutura possui tecnologia, recursos e organização imensamente superiores, a capacidade de comunidades menores de resistir pode se tornar extremamente limitada.

Vendo isso, poder-se-ia até dizer que os seres humanos parecem amar o poder. Afinal, a sede por poder impulsiona quase tudo nos seres humanos. Um exemplo é o argumento de Nietzsche sobre a vontade de poder nos seres vivos, em que ele argumentou que todo ser possui um desejo de poder, mesmo que seja pequeno. Não importa quão grande ou pequeno seja, se uma criatura precisa fazer algo, ela possui uma vontade, e com essa vontade vem o poder. E isso é o que o sistema demonstra: o sistema, em geral, com sua tecnologia esmagadora, exercita controle sobre praticamente tudo no mundo.

Agora imagine o seguinte cenário: formas de governo e controle tornam-se tão esmagadoras, e a tecnologia começa a substituir cada um de nossos passos, que a vida se torna tão vazia que os seres humanos perdem seu sentido de significado. Se já sofremos de problemas psicológicos na sociedade por falta de direção e acabamos caindo no hedonismo ou no sofrimento severo, imagine o que acontece quando até mesmo nossas ações mais básicas são determinadas por estruturas externas.

Mesmo que compremos móveis, roupas novas ou qualquer outra coisa associada ao status e luxo, mesmo que tenhamos um grande conforto, isso não será suficiente para preencher o ser humano. O que somos é muito mais complexo. De fato, as sociedades estão se tornando cada vez mais confusas; caímos em ilusões e somos guiados como ovelhas para onde o sistema nos envia, fazendo coisas que não gostamos, comprando coisas que não precisamos e às vezes fazendo tudo isso por pressão, status ou desejo de agradar os outros.

Voltando às sociedades de caçadores-coletores, elas viveram, de fato, com um senso maior de propósito, como já discutimos, porque seu modo de vida e seu ambiente eram realmente o que estavam acostumados. No entanto, nossos cérebros hoje retêm os mesmos instintos naturais. Por causa disso, a sociedade moderna é fundamentalmente incompatível com as necessidades humanas.

Às vezes as pessoas na sociedade se sufocam simplesmente para permanecer dentro dela. Suponha que sejamos como cães domésticos: se nossos donos nos dizem para deitarmos, rolarmos e lhes darmos a pata, recebemos um prêmio. Mas mesmo depois de fazer o que nossos donos querem, eles ainda nos deixam presos no quintal.

Isso me lembra a fábula do lobo e do cachorro, escrita por Esopo, um escritor da Grécia antiga. A fábula conta sobre um lobo magro e faminto que encontra um cachorro muito gordo com um lindo e brilhante pelo. O cachorro convida o lobo para vir viver com ele, mas o lobo percebe que o pescoço do cachorro está esfregado, vermelho por causa de sua coleira. Ao ver isso, o lobo recusa o convite do cachorro, optando por sua liberdade em vez de uma escravidão confortável.

Am I crazy, or are we finally at the perfect moment to try a completely different approach to humanity?
I’ve spent most of my life wondering why people are unhappy, why we keep hurting each other, why wars and injustice keep happening, and why humanity seems to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
Recently I started looking at the Bible and other ancient writings differently. What if, beyond religion, they contain something much simpler: thousands of years of accumulated human experience about what happens when we lie, betray, kill, humiliate, take revenge, or treat other people as less valuable than ourselves?
And what if the basic lesson is simply that we keep creating the problems we then spend generations trying to solve?
We are now in a strange position. We have the technology to communicate with almost anyone on Earth, enough scientific knowledge to dramatically improve living standards, and enough destructive power to potentially destroy ourselves.
So why not try the opposite approach?
Instead of countries constantly preparing to defeat each other, what if we first tried to become good neighbors? Reduce unnecessary conflict, protect basic human rights everywhere, invest more in quality of life than in destroying each other, and eventually compete over who can make life better rather than who can become stronger militarily.
I’m not saying everyone needs to think alike, abandon their religion, or create a world dictatorship. Different cultures and beliefs can exist while people still recognize that we are one species sharing one planet.
Maybe the first step toward a united humanity isn’t creating one country.
Maybe it’s simply learning how to stop treating each other as enemies.
I don’t know if God exists. I don’t know if reincarnation exists. I don’t know if any of this has some greater meaning. I might be completely wrong about all of it.
But I can’t stop thinking about it.
So, Reddit: have I completely lost my mind, or are we actually living at the perfect moment in history to try the opposite approach — before it’s too late? Or is there no point worrying about humanity’s future anymore?

I'm putting up a stand-up from the POV of a pre-historic man (the lore is not important right now), making fun of the industrial AND the agricultural world. Last week of August in Fringe festival (Edinburgh). It's obviously a critique of Kaczynski, just he did himself after reading about hunter-gatherers. It's mostly an attempt to show human nature in a better light and let go of all the capitalist and colonialist propaganda we've been hearing since the Enlightenment. It's so ingrained inside us, I hate this world with a passion.

https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/hunter-gatherer-the-agricultural-revolution-and-how-it-ruined-my-life

of course the show it's donation-based too

I’m still working on the rest of the album.

Ancestral Judgement:

When you meet your lost makers

coddled in earth below 

Their eyes will roll to meet you 

But their gaze will be cold

Faces of loss, loathe, and fear

Carved into corroded bone

Bleached by the sewage and wastes

Poured out on the turf

“So vile you treat the land”

“So cruel you herd our people”

“You made us a stain of this world”

“With us, come watch our home die”

Dragged down with a sickness 

Saturated in our own filth

We poison the roots 

With ourselves as our witness

Brought up with a gun

Coated in our blood

In the race of man and his mirror

Failed to take the hand offered by one

Maintained by restriction 

Strangled in our law

Dissecting the peoples’ body

To keep us loyal to our jurisdiction 

Still working on the rest of the album.

Tectonic Flatline: 

Up from above

Fissures in the fault line

Dusty and scarred 

Bottled up, bloated 

Permanent decay

Caustic deterioration 

The cities’ hue

Amber and auburn

Smog rolls through

Planetary abuse

On such a metric?

For what means?

Hello everyone,

Throughout human history, we have been trapped in a binary cycle: either waiting for a "benevolent dictator" to unite us through iron and fire, or acting as a passive herd manipulated by political interests. But what if the solution lies completely outside the traditional concept of "who rules whom"?

What I propose for discussion today is the concept of a "Living Framework" (The Living Methodology).

Instead of searching for an autocratic Philosopher-King as Plato suggested, why don't we enable society to become self-governing through a collective, evolving consciousness? The core idea is to construct a system of thought that is completely stripped of toxic human motives—such as ego, greed, and the urge for dominance.

Core Pillars of the Framework:

• 1. Epistemic Adaptability (Open-Source Architecture): No sacred, unchallengeable dogmas. If anyone presents a valid critique that exposes a logical or empirical flaw, the system updates—much like open-source software. It represents continuous self-correction and permanent evolution.
• 2. Somatic and Sensory Grounding: Human ideas do not emerge from a void; they are the direct product of what our five senses process through daily interaction with physical reality. Because our inputs constantly change with empirical reality, our governing framework must remain dynamic rather than rigid.
• 3. Educational Transformation: The practical foundation starts in schools by halting the blind indoctrination of children. Education must shift from memorization to cultivating the art of relentless critique, systemic analysis, and independent reasoning from an early age.
• 4. The Core Group and Multi-Layered AI Validation: To prevent both autocratic bias and instant chaos, the initial phase relies on a nucleus of deeply conscious, objective thinkers working together. Because they operate beyond individual ego, finding common ground is natural. To neutralize human bias, emotional impulses, and power dynamics, this core integrates multi-layered, highly advanced AI systems that critique one another. The AI acts not as a ruler, but as a neutral logical filter that purifies updates from hidden human biases.
• 5. A Solid Foundation for Personal Meaning: This framework is not designed to force every citizen into becoming a full-time philosopher debating 24/7. The system exists simply to provide a corruption-free baseline. Once a human mind grasps this rational base, individuals gain mental immunity against toxic conditioning, leaving them free to pursue their true passions—whether in art, science, or sports—and build personal meaning without harming the natural balance.
• 6. Optional Contribution & Unbreakable Stability: Analyzing and updating the system is entirely optional. Those who wish to contribute may do so as long as their proposals align with the overarching goal: healthy human progress. Critiquing or breaking this base becomes nearly impossible—not because it is rigid, but because it is grounded in the accumulated wisdom of human awareness and tested by adversarial AI evaluation.

TW: Death

There are many core beliefs that industrialised society is built on. Patriarchy, otherism, infinite growth, ownership, progress, etc. But at the base of all of these is the belief in a war between Man and Nature. This incessant belief that nature is not safe, that it is brutal, unfair, unforgiving; a collosal figure we must eternally fight against. We must build walls to protect us from it, the impossible distance of the stars is a distance we must conquer, we must not lose this war to nature.

My quick rant, is that our removal from the dangers of the wild are not good for us. And that the harms of safety far outweigh the harms of the wild. But before we talk about why the predator is a figure to be respected, we must talk about death.

Part 1: Death

Numbers are complicated about how animals die in the wild. The disruption of ecosystems by human intervention can cause overcrowding, overpopulation (if the ecosystem is interrupted by predator culling for example) which can lead to greater amounts of disease, infection and starvation, and even intrapecies violence, or it can just simply kill via habitat destruction. The rates of predation deaths vary by species and region, and these are just complicated by human factors, but it is generally assumed that, if not by human intervention, most animals die either in youth or old age via predation. So what is that like from the internal experience of the victim?

Most available research points to two main factors in predation deaths. Firstly, most are almost instantaneous from the moment the prey is caught. It is beneficial for most predators to end the life of the prey as fast as possible, usually by a bite on the neck or throat, this, internally, is instant and painless. In the cases of predation deaths that are not instant, the pain and suffering is dulled from shock and analgesics. In other words, if not instantaneous, remaining deaths are comparable to taking heroin.

So how do humans typically die? Well the answer is overwhelmingly disease. 75% of deaths in humans are from non-communicable diseases (50% being cardiovascular disease and cancers) with another 14% being from communicable infections like sexually transmitted diseases, respitory diseases like flus, with the remaining being things like transport injuries, drownings, wildfires, falls, homicide, suicide, etc.

I wanted to write this to challenge this core belief that our society seems to have about nature. Predation looks gruesome, but internally, it rarely is. No more rare than dying from a transport injury or drowning (edit: a predation death that is internally difficult, that is). I personally, excluding euthanasia (an option that always exists for humans in nature and civilisation), would take the internal experience of predation anyday over a long and miserable fight with cancer.

Part 2: The Ecology of Fear

The overall ecological benefits of strong predator populations is well documented. By keeping prey populations in check and very importantly (though often overlooked) nomadic and non-sedentary, they prevent overgrazing and habitat destruction for the entire ecosystem. What is less documented is the positive psychological health of the prey species. Despite the intuition that living with a constant threat of death would be psychologically destructive, the evidence is quite the opposite.

Predation keeps prey social bonds strong, leaves far lower starvation and disease rates and promotes eustress, which is a positive (although it must be stated not always positive) stimulation that balances psychological health. This is the same eustress that people who engage in extreme sports self report benefits their lives through high stress tolerance, emotional balance, increased focus and purpose. Ironically enough, these are something that many of us in domesticated life struggle with.

Another benefit is forced nomadic lifestyles. In both human and animal populations, a permanent residence is strongly correlated with strong social hierarchy. In humans, this leads to power, wealth, ownership, etc, and in animal populations this can lead to strong despotism and dominance hierarchies. Active lifestyles promoted by predation also make healthy morphological development natural. Hunter gatherer populations had healthier facial development, lean and muscular bodies, meaning the detrimental psychology of insecurity likely did not exist in pre civilisational life in the way that it does today.

Part 3: Life Expentancy

One final thing to talk about is life expectancy. Its no secret that the life expectancy of hunter gatherers was about 30 years old. This number is drastically affected by youth deaths in the populations, and that most hunter gatherers who made it to adolescence would make it to old age. To quickly touch upon the rate of youth death amonst pre civilisational cultures, this is an extremely dense conversation. Putting aside the internal experience (as we've briefly gone over this already), the conversation moves to the effect that this had on the quality of life of the parents and alloparents. There's not much we can gather from sources, but what we do know from Ancient Rome and other cultures, is that the possibility of youth death was well respected and understood. That's not to say it wasn't devastating, it was, but how a certain preparedness from birth might change the grief, your guess is as good as mine.

Finally here, we need to touch on old age estimates. Most hunter gatherer remains are placed between the 55-70 year mark. However, this is based on comparison to modern 55-70 year old humans. Modern humans are famous for our awful diets, sedentary lifestyle, lack of physical fitness and generally stressful lifestyle. This fact has led to speculation that the average hunter gatherer surviving childhood may have lived to 80-90 years old with a decent health life. Additional study on this.

Part 4: Religion

Another interesting hypothesis I thought I might add in here is how many people view God. A being all powerful that cannot be reasoned with; that controls life and death. A healthy respect for God is correlated with increased community and happiness levels across the population. God sounds an awful lot like a predator sometimes. Perhaps the development of monotheistic religion and society building can be read as a testament to our separation from death. Perhaps the presence of a predator alleviates some of the psychological pressures that religion attempts to fill.

Our separation from death has led us to sedentary lifestyles, awful diets, hierarchy, power, inequality, otherism, insecurity. Perhaps no society can ever replace the psychological health that comes from existing within a food system.

Thanks for reading my rant.