How to be a Human Being
Because I'm fairly certain we aren't doing it right anymore.
It seems, especially as of late, that most, if not all, of us have forgotten how to be human beings. And by this I mean that the existence that we are all leading is not to the benefit of our individual or collective well-being: the ways in which we are simply being alive are unhealthy, harmful, and sometimes downright dangerous.
I think it’s really easy to point fingers up at the people who are living especially harmfully: those who grab at seemingly endless power and money at the expense of anyone and everyone. But the reality is that we are all part of an epidemic of holistic human behaviour that does more to hurt us than help us thrive, whether we want to be or not.
The truth is that we have been born into a culture that has largely forgotten what it means to be human beings in a shared ecosystem on this planet. Somewhere along the lines of the history of colonialism, we collectively adopted a supremacist, human-centric view of the world that has isolated us, disconnected us, confusing us and telling us lies about our place in the world and ultimately how we should live. More recently, capitalism has done a number on our collective conscience, convincing us that motives like convenience, power, and profit are the ultimate priorities, and we now find ourselves stuck in an existence that leaves many of us believing that humans are ultimately at odds with the rest of nature: a cancer that can only cause harm.
This is not true! Human beings have an important role to play on this planet that contributes to the well-being of the whole. We can look back at pre-colonial cultures to get a glimpse of what this role might be, but there are also people all around us that are building out new systems and understandings: new cultures that are decolonial; examples of how we can move forward, not back, to living rich and full lives grounded in reciprocity and well-being.
"When we understand the gifts of all our whanaunga, all our relatives in the natural world, then we can start to understand our place in the world as a species." - Donna Kerridge on Rongoā Māori
I used to think of nature connection as something to teach my kids: something that they learned in forest school that was somewhat intangible but important. Going back a few years, I realized that my own nature connection was limited to appreciation, having spent my summers in canoes and feeling as though I had spent enough time in nature to understand it.
Nature connection, though, is so much more than simple appreciation. It’s a deep understanding of the ecosystems in which we live. It’s observing and learning from the world around us. It’s ultimately about undoing that top-down, human supremacist cultural viewpoint that places human beings at the top of the pyramid rather than placing them amongst the jumbled web of life. Part of the human experience, then, is understanding our unique positioning in that web: what services do we offer to our co-tenants on this planet? What gifts do we leave in reciprocal living? How do we meet our basic needs without bulldozing, literally and metaphorically, the rest of life in our ecosystems? These are questions we no longer know the answers to, and the answers are critical to living rich and fulfilling lives.
Living in harmony with nature isn’t the only thing that we’ve forgotten how to do. In the podcast On Being, I remember hearing host Krista Tippett remark that this is the first time in the history of humanity that we have had to reinvent religion. By this, I think she means that the foundational structures and understandings of religion are no longer as accepted or relevant in our lives as they have been throughout history.
Tippett’s comment is a reflection about how we are navigating our collective spiritual and ethical lives without the guidance that a spiritual or religious cultural component might have once provided. As we confront the reality that religion is yet another structure that has collapsed under the weight of late-stage corporate capitalism and colonialism, many of us are left questioning what it might have been like to have genuine spiritual messaging as part of our cultural upbringing that has largely been lost.
Instead, our instruction manual of how to be a human has been replaced with a relentless stream of capitalist propaganda that cares little for connection or well-being and more for supremacist views that suggest we kill or be eaten. The long-term result of decades of indoctrination into these cultural messages is unfounded animosity, a competitive mindset where we feel we are constantly threatened by others, and a complete absence of knowledge on how to rely on others in our communities.
It often feels as though we literally don’t know how to live together anymore.
And while this cultural narrative has been building for generations, the global pandemic in which we all isolated and burrowed online for what meagre community connection digital interaction offers seems to have exacerbated the individualism and isolation we had all been experiencing.
I look at my friends, exhausted from working 9-5s, often struggling to make ends meet, and do not fault them for not having the energy or spoons at the end of the day to do anything but collapse in front of a TV or phone in hopes to regulate their nervous systems. I look at our kids, having come of age playing video games online rather than hanging in friends’ basements. When I suggest they text friends to hang out or get together, they tell me, “That’s not how we do it anymore,” and they’re right! People don’t just hang out anymore. But we should be. Because it’s part of the human experience to exist in real space with other people, learning and sharing, growing and experiencing life together in community with one another. And by limiting our casual human interactions, the exponential graph of human isolation rises sharply.
So, how do we fix this? I wish I had a cut-and-dry answer. I can tell you there is no marketable solution: no one size fits all. Just as we are culturally, economically, and socially diversified across time and space, so must be the solutions we implement in our own lives. I can also tell you there is nothing you can buy, nothing you can consume, nothing you will see in TV infomercials, and likely no courses that will be taught that will teach you how to be a better human being. The implementation of ideas will unfold in a million different ways, and, as
recently quoted Diane di Prima in her latest essay; we need “shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down”.That being said, in examining the problem, we can start to see some common threads to pull in finding solutions:
Understanding Nature Connection. More than just appreciation, we need to develop a deep understanding of the web of life on this planet and our unique position in that web, not just as a human species but as individuals and collective communities existing in diverse ecosystems.
Rejection of Capitalist Ideology. We do not live in isolated boxes where we are in competition with everyone and everything around us. We do not exist to make money and line the pockets of billionaires. Human existence and well-being TRANSCEND the notion of consumer-based capitalism. We need to reject this ideology in order to build a new cultural narrative that places well-being at the centre of what it means to be a human being.
Deconstructing Supremacy. I would think in 2025 that I wouldn’t need to explain this, but just as no one human identity is better than any other, humans are not better than other life on this planet. Our existence depends on the naturally occurring diversity in which we live, and executing on the colonial mindset that we must eradicate that which is not the same as us damages not only the other but the self as well.
Prioritizing Human Connection. Yes, we are tired. Yes, it is hard. Yes, we are currently divided and exhausted and utterly out of spoons. But the only way forward is to connect with each other, in real space if we can, to learn how to support each other and co-exist and just hang out. We need to learn how to rely on each other instead of top-down structures. We need to learn how to care for each other.
This is a starting point, somewhere to jump off. It is not the endpoint. It is not the finish line. I have no idea what that looks like. It is honestly so obscured from where we all sit right now, but I do really believe that this is the foundation that we need to lay in order to build the new structures we so desperately need.
Everyone keeps saying this, and it’s not wrong: now is the time to connect. Potlucks. Coffee dates. Community events. There’s so much happening out there, and it’s not hard to get connected. It takes time and energy, yes, and I know we are exhausted. But it’s so critical to take those extra steps, lest we get stuck in the mire of the present.
Stay well and stay healthy, friends.