Let’s just say you’re not supposed to settle down at any point in your life. But who decided that in the first place? Who declared it the right way? Who thought it could have been right?
Hell, who decided what is right and what is wrong? Who distinguished between them?
Who was the first person in the world who thought building a house would be the single most necessary thing in a person’s life, and that it would provide him security, shelter, food, privacy, and, of course, the good old, happiness?
The entirety of humankind’s story has been about man building his world in order to pursue happiness, to the point where happiness is a product today and is found in the enterprise world. It is sold and sought after at the same time.
We just suppose things, then believe in them, and then work for them to come true. It’s a whole process, each with its steps. It is on this belief that humans are to live; they lived by it and curated each action in their lives.
The very first hunt in the life of the hunter-gatherer led to the shelter and the food he stored for himself. It was a nomadic life. There never was a concept of permanent residence, but that became possible with the agricultural revolution. It gave them a sense that they could collect, store, and stay in one place. It was at this point that he used his supposition and decided the peripatetic life could be abandoned. Other species lived at that time as well, and many eventually completed that cycle: they lived, faced some natural calamity, and then vanished. Humans became the ones better suited to natural selection and were thus selected, ever since we have lived this way.
Otherwise we would have been one more vanished species, like the dodo.
You may know Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens he mentions how humans were actually able to seep through the nets of natural selection and survive until today, and how our thinking changed through the phenomenon of Agricultural development. The Industrial Revolution was like the last nail in the coffin: it propagated the notions created by the agricultural revolution, settling down, forming communities, building societies, and it helped humans stand together and fight external threats, even mammals far larger than themselves.
This helped overcome many security challenges, but it also changed how humans understood life. It was the first time a species truly settled on Earth and made a habitat, a lifetime habitat, strong enough to face future threats. This is one reason we have survived: from the moment of stone weapons and spears to today, when you step out to pay taxes, go to your job, visit your office or school, or relax by a swimming pool, it is all because we supposed life as we went and built it along the way.
All of this only became possible because belief did not remain abstract, it materialized. Everything rests on belief. Cars move because we imagined travel should be easier. Today humans dominate the planet: we build towering structures, form settled communities, and shape landscapes with roads and infrastructure. No other species, however strong, has built a society like ours. Where we stand now is the consequence of past suppositions turned into action: one assumed idea led to another, and that chain of actions is the life we live today.
If you look from outside, as if an observer in space, you’d see one species that created an internal life on Earth while many other species came and went. Some developed, many became endangered or extinct, but this one managed to surpass them and stands today. It is the first time for us as a species to live like this, (assuming aliens haven’t found us and we’re not in a matrix) Earth is our HOME now.
When we built communities and walls and homes, we began to believe in them and to suppose how life should be. The next thought after building a home was to sustain it and prepare it for coming generations. Before this, many people died in childbirth, from diseases such as plague, and entire populations were wiped out. Now we have science, healthcare, and institutions that have made birth easier; births outnumber deaths in many places. We have more humans on Earth today because we changed nature and took every possible step as a species to preserve our blood, DNA, and continuity. We are doing everything we can to avoid extinction.
And so it is now that, after building, we can think of our generations, we can actually plan for them, because we have built.
Again, all this was not indoctrinated somewhere; humans had assumed it in the first place: that THIS is the purpose of life. He started finding meaning in this life, and in the process of creating purpose, he supposed life to be this way. He measured it, thought of it to be this way, and in thinking so, in doing so, he decided to make it as comfortable as possible.
Hard floor to sit on? Let’s get ourselves a mattress. Why not a bed, with a sofa and extra cushions? A TV is really needed, what else to do when we can’t find worthy work? So let’s make a radio, then an LED. We made the wheel, then the train, and now the bullet train; cars developed from gas to electric, less manual and sleeker. But since when did sleekness start to matter? From a life where the most haunting thing at night was an attack from an external beast on your shelter, to today where we worry more about sleekness, fashion, taxes, jobs, and bills. This is the journey we have completed. This is where our supposition has brought us.
When the columns of necessity began to fill, we started looking at the optionals. When most was done, we began to worry about the unimportant. It started because we thought these things must be important to live a certain pattern, a supposed pattern, a precedent map someone drew years ago. We walk the earth the way we do: working a day job, paying taxes, defined by rules, all of which was made by a society built on some supposition, assuming this might give us the ultimate peace.
But it never did. It never did.
We thought we were building a life.
And trust me on this one: “It has not“.
