Nature is the principal enemy of our individual lives. It’s not that I would prefer asphalt landscapes over trees and flowers. It’s also not that I would view nature in the form of lions and tigers as an enemy. The expression of nature that I consider an enemy is not the nature that surrounds us, but the nature within.
Nature has genetically programmed us as individuals to leave the scene after a meager hundred years, while we could just as well be genetically programmed to have individual lives of thousands of years.
Nature has programmed us to physically decline after reaching an early peak in our twenties. Nature has dictated a quick turnover rate for humans (though it’s not quite as short as the turnover rate for rats and cats).
Nature has equipped us with an instrument of cognition, which is inadequate because its primary function is not cognition, but to give us a competitive edge in the survival of the fittest.
As best I can, I try to overcome the limitations nature has programmed for me. I am not interested in being a tool of nature (that fascist force) for the creation of more optimized specimens of the human species. I can’t see any other purpose in life but to be concerned with my own life. This means to live as long as possible, and to get as much as possible out of life.
I’m aware of the limitations that still apply to me. One day, individual humans will live thousands of years, or in fact, indefinitely. Having been born a few hundred years too early, I will not be among them.
I’m not even independent enough from nature to freely choose to end my existence, and to act upon this choice right now.
Instead, I am but a slave to nature in my instinctive but ridiculous fear of death. I’m toiling along, like billions of other humans, caught in lives in which happiness is but an illusion, and in which only suffering is real. Because this is how nature, our enemy, has programmed it to be. But we shall overcome (not me, but later generations).
