I have been watching a lot of animal videos in the last few weeks. It is fascinating to see how similar yet different animal and human lives are. The lives of three animal species were particularly captivating.
Baby seals spend the first 10 days of their lives drinking their mother’s very fatty milk. After these 10 days, the mother’s milk dries up. The mothers then leave their offspring to search for food and never return.
Orcas, commonly known as killer whales, are one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. They hunt in groups with their most senior whale in the lead. The senior whales are vital for the group’s survival because they teach their hunting techniques to the youngest members. Some of these techniques take up to 15 years to master. One way orcas hunt seals is by generating a large wave that washes a seal resting on ice floes. If the ice floe is surrounded by ice, they push it to an area with less ice and wash the seal off the floe. Orcas need to eat a seal every day.
Polar bears need to eat at least one seal every week. Due to the melting ice, they have developed a new hunting technique. They swim quietly around a seal resting on an ice floe, trying to catch it before the seal reaches the water. Once the seal is in the water, it’s game over for the polar bear. Eight out of ten hunting maneuvers end in failure.
Watching all these stories about animals, it is clear that their main goal in life is centered around survival. Especially around food. Our lives as human beings are also centered around food. Some might argue it is also about gathering. gathering money, wealth, tools, goods, etc. But essentially, it all comes back to food. The main goal of wealth is to guarantee our survival. And the only thing we need to survive is food and water. Just as every other species in this universe.
However, humans possess a distinct quality. Initially, I believed it was our ability to craft and understand complex ideas, akin to a chain of thought. But observing the hunting tactics of orcas, I have begun to question this belief.
A realization then struck me: our uniqueness lies in our capacity to think about and express our true selves. People who are able to do something that inlines with their true intrinsic passion have a great influence on our lives. People like Richard Feynmann, Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking, and Marie Currie. When watching Richard Feynmann explaining physics, we can literally see the passion in his eyes. Marie Currie used to wake up in the middle of the night to conduct experiments driven by sheer passion.
Such individuals do what they do because it resonates with their true selves, making everything else in life secondary. Many of us don’t reach this state. The reason is simple. In order for society to work, we don’t need a unique set of skills. We need a standard set of skills. The goal of university degrees is to bring us to a standardized level of qualification.
If you own a business, you need a worker to do exactly what you want. Someone who is willing to learn the way you conduct your business. Someone who is standardizable. This way the work will keep going and you might believe that everyone is happy, at least you as a business owner are.
But the problem with this concept is the following: in order for your business to function, you need workers to do the job you want. In order to do this, workers need to learn the way you conduct your work. Doing so means they have to spend their time, usually years, learning what you need them to learn. But this doesn’t reflect the true identity of the worker. It may reflect your own identity or your own values, but not theirs. Yet in order for the system to function, workers need to adopt these new values to the point where these new values, which in reality came from you as a business owner, become part of their own identity. If these new values become part of the identity of the workers, it means that workers have to lose part of their own identity in order to comply with the required identity at work. if these values don’t become part of their identity, the workers will have internal conflicts. The more these internal conflicts grow, the more dissatisfaction arises. One might think that the easiest way to deal with these conflicts is to say: This is how the business is done, I am not going to reinvent the wheel. By doing so you are giving in on yourself. It means you don’t have the power to deal with conflicts anymore. And the winner is the new identity. It might not be the identity of the business yet, but it is certainly not your own true identity.
This means that in order for societies to function, we as human beings need to give up on the thing that makes us who we are, our ability to think about and express our own true selves. Otherwise, our lives will be full of conflicts.