watching animals live made me sad realize how strange and unnatural our lives are

i was watching a video of animals just… existing. living their lives, doing what they were made to do. and for some reason, it made me incredibly somber, sad, and i can’t explain why. i wish i could be them on some level. i wish i could say sorry to them for how we’re destroying the planet. it hit me how far removed we are from the life we were meant to live, if there even is such a thing anymore.

most of the things we stress about daily are so abstract. rent, debt, jobs, taxes, productivity, social status. none of these things existed in the world we evolved for. no other creature wakes up wondering how they’re going to afford to be alive. they just live. meanwhile, we’ve built a system so complex and self-sustaining that we can’t even see outside of it. we’re so tangled in our own inventions that we forget they are inventions. money, borders, economies, politics, all these strange little rules and constraints that dictate our lives. all artificial.

and it’s not just that we created this artificial world. it’s that we built something fundamentally hostile to both nature and ourselves. every advancement we’ve made, every luxury we’ve earned, has come at the cost of something real. we have medicine and security, but we’ve lost something too. the way we live now is killing the planet, stripping away wild spaces, and turning every inch of the world into something useful to us. and yet, even with all these supposed advancements, humans are more depressed, more disconnected, more anxious than ever.

i know i am romanticizing a bit, but i think about prehistoric humans painting on cave walls, sitting around fires, sharing stories, living in small, tight-knit tribes where survival was a communal effort. there was hardship, hunger, illness, of course, but there was also clarity, love, community, and freedom. life wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t complicated either. there were no existential crises about productivity or life purpose or whether you’d be able to retire before your body gives out. there was just the land, the people, the immediate concerns of food, shelter, warmth, and community. there was a kind of purity to it. it saddens me that i can’t go back to such a world where animals were plentiful and nature was untouched and the environment was not destroyed. i imagine what coral reefs were like, or forests were like, or an untouched beach free from any human development or man made structure was like. i don’t want to see cement, i don’t want to watch the news, i don’t want to experience man made structures or complex modern rituals and beliefs. i want to go back and paint on caves and sit by the fire.

and meanwhile, the animals in those videos? they still have that. the deer moving through a quiet forest, the birds soaring without borders, the wolves hunting together as a pack. none of them are trapped in the strange, self-destructive maze we’ve made for ourselves. they live in a world that makes sense. or at least, they did. because even that’s being taken from them.

why do we live life on earth like we are the center?

i can’t believe how rare life is on this blue planet, we get gifted this one life and intelligence and all we do is get ourselves wrapped in artificial and abstract concepts and destroy the planet and ourselves in the process.

i’d like to move away from the artificiality of the real world back into an authentic life, which is impossible to do.

it’s hard not to feel like we’re just parasites, consuming everything until there’s nothing left. we push nature further and further into the margins, forcing animals to adapt to a shrinking world while we multiply and expand without limit. and yet, despite everything we’ve taken, it never feels like enough. we are more powerful than ever, and somehow less satisfied.

i don’t know if there’s a way back. maybe there isn’t. maybe this is just the natural trajectory of intelligence, building itself into an unsustainable corner, too clever for its own good. but i can’t shake the feeling that, in all our progress, we lost something vital. something real. and i don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.