Complex Systems and Complex People

The sense of calm enveloped him like a crooning lover.

It felt like..being balanced, homeostasis. He had finally reached equilibrium, the mode of being where focus, attention and being in a state of flow was all that mattered. Bedeviled by distractions on all sides, he felt as if his sense of attention had become blunt, an ode to the days when long hours could be spent in the tone of a voluminous book, for hours at a stretch, the vice-like grip of the narrative on hand, meriting that every pore of the body hung on to every word. He could still spend hours on a book. Although he had lost a little practice. He decided to begin his book-reading habit again. He wanted to preserve the habit because he liked to read books.

Swiveling around in a customized chair that had an extra back rest, he looked outside, from his first floor office. He wanted to be at a co-working space with tastefully maintained interiors filled with the arts, coffee-vending machines, motivational quotes, plants, the gym and the common community kitchen. Plus it gave him a chance to meet other professionals from other industry segments, like real estate, mining, consumer durables and electronics, food delivery and advertising tech, among many others. He worked in the healthcare industry, enabling patients get access to medical cannabis and its derivatives for a host of acute and chronic illnesses.

He remembered once reading somewhere that the human brain was still in the state of evolution where it was programmed to be living in the jungle, explaining our sense of belonging when amidst nature, rather than being surrounded by other human beings living in structures designed in multiple shapes, made of materials obtained from fossil fuels. Exactly why this particular fact bothered him at this current point of time, he couldn’t understand, but what he could understand was that humanity’s relationship with plants lay at a crossroads. Sure, his thoughts were influenced by all the available literature published about climate change, the amazon rain-forest, melting glaciers and how related they were to the welfare of their plant brethren.

In a sense, they spoke to him about the grander scenario of the circle of life, each living organism and ecosystem on the planet, from the smallest cell to complex environments like forests, deserts and oceans, being dependent on the other at various points of their existence, with respect to their brief life span, with the objective instruction to each living cell being survival at all costs. Now, this complicated ecosystem also included the innumerable quantities of goods and services which have been bought into existence by human beings. How had a specimen descended from tree-inhabiting creatures evolved into an all-conquering force, intent on rewriting the rules of all the ecosystems it itself was a part of?

And, why would it want to?

There is no single reason. There are many reasons. And these reasons began with the very first step. We do not know the reason as to why we came down from the trees. In fact, the very statement of proclaiming that humanity evolved evokes mixed reactions even in this day and age, religion’s hold on the theory of creation still reigning strong, for good reasons. Deciphering the reasons to a chain of questions would inevitably lead us to all the mysteries of life, not withstanding the Bermuda triangle, the rise of fascism, discussions on the futility of life being elitist in nature, opening up the space for humanity’s quest to open new frontiers of commerce, one of them, space mining, significantly having the potential to satisfy all our material requirements.

Avenues were aplenty for human beings to decipher the reasons of our complex relationship with nature. These avenues include creating population control themes like bio-terrorism for example, and others which include our complex relationship with technological progress, like satisfying our carnal desires of lust on the internet, which in turn was related to our quest to unlock the complete functioning of the human body, led by research in neuroscience.

We will not stop. There is only change.