Article written by Corneliu Bodea, CEO of Adrem
I am aware that it is a month of the year when, on the one hand, the rush to try to complete what we set out to do this year, and on the other hand, the need for peace and quiet tries our greedy beings to overcome another invisible but universally accepted boundary, such as the end of the calendar year. I am also aware that the expectations of this period are far too ambitious and this fact contributes to the increase of anxiety, but nevertheless I come to you with a heavy concern.
I’m going to talk to you next about an old concern, but one that has been circling me more and more avidly, causing me to often think, namely, the extent to which we humanity are really moving in the right direction. Of course, I do not claim to have a clear and definitive answer to such a problem, but I want to emphasize the importance of our action and the responsibility of generating a positive context.
We talk so much about progress, about growth and development, we place the present times at the head of the series of epochs known to history, making arguments like: increased life expectancy, technological development, comfort and safety of life. It is undoubtedly relevant how many years we live, in what physical conditions, how many scientific unknowns we decipher and how far in time or space we can see. Our rational side dives into contentment and confirmation and pushes us forward. But it is equally important, I would dare to call it at least as important, what we feel about what is happening to our time, to our soul, to the environment in which we live and to the future we are building.
As we learned philosophically from Spinoza and Kant, and scientifically from Einstein and Heinsenberg, what defines and surrounds us is relative rather than absolute. Thus, the progress we are discussing is mostly relative. The chocolate eclair is sweet and good, but nothing compares to the one eaten after a period of fasting…
With this clumsy explanation, I would mean life expectancy, the time we live on this Earth, the safety of life, comfort, the environment and what we feel inside. We absolutely live longer, but the years pass at a speed directly proportional to the amount of information we become permeable to. We do not know when a new year has begun and when it ends, the sensation we experience is that of condensing time to the duration of a moment. We live in comfort, but crammed into small spaces, breathing noxious air, moving exclusively in gyms and fighting weight gain. We are sure that a lion can’t eat us (if we don’t take inflation into account…), but a nuclear war can destroy our race, or terrorism can evaporate the sense of security in any civilized city. We have only 4% of all mammals on the globe as wild animals, the rest being farmed animals and humans (34%), 99.9% of the species that have ever populated the globe are extinct today, with a higher extinction rate 10,000 times the average historical natural rate, which qualifies our period as the second fastest after the famous Cretaceous extinction that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. We are experiencing climate change at an unprecedented rate, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, even though we have extremely ambitious reduction targets.
I believe that a revolution is necessary in which the rush for profit and technological development is mitigated by the sustainability of actions, care for society and people, for their spiritual and mental well-being. A revolution where values are audited and aligned with people’s ideals and not exclusively with their interests. As the most intelligent and self-aware species, we have this responsibility!
This revolution can only be accomplished to the extent that each in his place acts. We talk about diversity and reject it, we declare ourselves responsible and consume irresponsibly, we complain about education, but we are not concerned with the souls of our children, but with their material needs.
Each of us is a creator of context around us, whether it’s friends, family, or in the case of leaders, thousands of people. The context we create compounds with that created by others and counts in the final result. There are too few who can personally influence the resulting global context and usually they are people… whose intentions and interests are debatable. No one can ever oppose billions of people who build a positive context, based on universal values, who express their choice of beings, of responsible beings. These must make us feel like strong active actors, capable of defining our own future through our actions.
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