Modern Man’s Need for Ease and How It Makes Life Worse
Debate student’s opinion essay from Ms. Habig’s Debate class.
April 18, 2023
From the dawn of time humanity has strived to make life easy. We went from running and hiding in treetops to protect ourselves from predators. Then we ran around with pointy sticks and began to challenge everything for that top spot on the food chain. Now, we have gone so far beyond the powers of other species that we can only challenge ourselves. Long ago, humanity lived in tribes of hundreds of people, now we live in thousands or millions. Instead of loving the world around us and using every piece of a kill, we get excited to see squirrel and rarely know what part of the animal we are eating. Is it possible that all this time and effort humanity has put in to being on top has made life worse for everyone?
Take the predator subject. We used to hide in trees to escape predators, but once we had to come down from the trees and had to start fighting, we were nearly destroyed. Until one man thought of using a stick with a point as a weapon. Now we spend so much time in our homes and other buildings that we’ve lost touch with the world around us. Just outside the school, there is a little field. If you look at it, you can see tall grass and some trees. It’s not the prettiest, but can you imagine it across the road, covering the buildings, stretching for miles. The world used to be dangerous for our physical beings, but now everywhere we look it’s more mental trauma. Everyday we hear more and more about how the world is dying and we re killing it. Everyday we wake up with this existential dread in out back pocket. But a thousand years ago, when Native Americans roamed these lands, they didn’t seem to struggle at all. They all seemed happy and content with their lives. They did not harm nature and rarely struggled with major predators. Sure, they had fighting amongst tribes, but compared to modern day wars in which it’s a constant worry of who will blow up who, I’d much rather take the tribal wars.
Take the internet. A wonderful place where all information can be shared. All ideas are welcome. Everything you could ever want is here. But was it too much? Humanity does not seem capable of all this. Everyday it’s something new. One day this politician gets found out to be a horrible person, then a government sends malware to its neighbor, then a natural disaster hits this place many hundreds of thousands of miles away. Humanity is not capable of holding this much data. We are not capable of switching so quickly. The medieval era was frown upon because it slowed humanity’s development, but what if it was a good thing. Sure, not a lot happened, but some stuff did come out of that time period. It all just happened so slowly. Humanity was given time to process all that happened. But now we’ve gone from using newspapers as the fastest form of information, to thousands of articles on every topic within seconds. It has begun to affect the youth and make their lives so much worse.
Take Tik-Tok for example, it’s a fun app where you can watch people post about crazy, or stupid things they did. But there’s no limit on how long you can watch it. Kids and teens have begun to have serious issues with patience thanks to these issues. Gone are the days of 7 minutes of fun episodes, 3 minutes of ads, then more episode. Now it’s constant small episodes normally around a minute or less followed by more of the same thing. Worst part of all of it, some people know what it does. Tik-Tok in China, the country in which Tik-Tok is owned, is far different to what we have here in the states. In China, it tries to share only the interesting topics that are educational and STEM-based. It also limits the people using it to just 40 minutes of use per day. But here in the states, there’s no time restriction and little to no limit on what can be shown.
I could go on for much longer, but I’ll cut it off here. Humanity has come so far in the ten thousand plus years we’ve been around. In that time, we’ve gone from doing no more than use pointy sticks, to creating complex government systems with weapons so powerful it could destroy our planet many times over. We as a species has done so many great things. We cultivated the world around us to fit our wants and needs. But in that process, we’ve ruined ourselves. We’ve put ourselves in a cage where we hold the key, but do not want to use it. We’ve doomed ourselves to a fate worse than death. A fate in which we have little safety and resolution. A fate in which we know not the answer and can only guess a way out. I’m sorry for the depressing ending, but I’m sure it’s nothing new to you.