I want us all to realize we, humans, as the most intelligent major species on earth, are on a trajectory to live the shortest. Even if you choose to ignore the doomsday scenario in one-thousand-years predicted by, now deceased, Steven Hawking.

In any case, the human species will live around sixteen-thousand times shorter than the bee possessing a tiny pin-sized brain. Think about that fact for a moment, and let it sink in before you continue reading about how we can improve our odds.

Why?

The answer to why we are on a shortlived trajectory lies in stubborn narcissism.

The bee is uninterested and unequipped to challenge the laws of nature, and instantly adapts to the environment in which it is placed. The bee has a short individual lifespan, during which it is forced to perfect its evolutionary contribution or perish. Despite not much intelligence, the bee plays an ingenious and crucial role in extending the evolution of the flora and fauna on which it depends.

We, humans, do the opposite. We put ourselves on a pedestal – above nature – and assign a premium to intelligence that, by virtue of our selfish values, systemically depreciates adaptability. We trash the environment upon which we depend. We each try to live as long as possible and amass as much money and power to cunningly rise above others, in complete ignorance to nature’s first-principles. Our bodies held up by medicine to the point the next generation cannot even give birth without.

Humans in “the developed” countries have become the least adaptable species on the planet.

Wake Up Or Carry On

Do we really want to carry on like this?

Clearly, nature assigns more value to adaptability than intelligence, from an evolutionary standpoint. And thus, if we are smart and want to prolong our life-span on earth, we would use our innate intelligence to contribute to our adaptability. Which brings us to the methods humanity prescribes itself.

Humans are not the only species to use dominance and subservience to band together to gain protection and achieve a better quality of life; lions do too. It is precisely our unique collaborative nature that allowed humanoids to escape the rough plains of Africa to which our bodies were not well suited.

We are, however, the only species that manage to dictate how other groups — of the same species — should live their life, even when they are not in the same vicinity.

The Human Theory

Humans have developed so-called systems by which we deploy methods to enable sustained growth, ignoring comfortably how growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell (Edward Abbey). Suspend also for a moment, sustainability, as a dependable form of absolutism is an evolutionary oxymoron, nonexistent anywhere in the universe. The plot thickens.

Coming back to the bee, the evolution of the bee is predicated on renewal, prolonging its sustainability. Cause leading to a proxy of consequence, in that order. The bee also relies on a dynamic equilibrium with nature, to which it gives back what it receives. The bee is also forced to adhere to nature’s first principles and does not make up its own rules, as it has no way of challenging such foregone evolutionary conclusions.

Humans, on the other hand, have built methods (they do not deserve to be called systems), that violate nature’s first-principles, increase our incompatibility, and thus ultimately accelerate our demise. For nature does not bend to, or care about humanity. Hence the sum of what people want, as in a democracy, has no bearing on what humanity needs to survive; their methods incompatible.

Humanity deploys static monisms of want, using one-size-fits-all myths of sustainability whereas nature evolves around dynamic relativity of need, boosting the strength and plurality of renewal.

Encore

My point is quite simple. Humanity must begin to adhere to our best understanding of nature’s first-principles and refresh all manmade-systems with those principles in mind. We can do so one at a time, but we must change them all. Only then can humanity evolve the way a bee does, and be(e) better.