Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9553003:


Friendship Bracelet 8 11, 3:17pm

'@Bloodblender' There are different kinds of office work, but yes, it's a lot more mentally stressful than being, for example, working at construction site. Though there you might be working physically hard in dusty environment in really hot or extremely cold temperatures while still sweating the full 8 hours a day in joint- and muscular pain and getting bleeding cuts in dirty hands in almost weekly basis, and if you are very allergic, you may not be able to even visit there.

The term "natural" is a complex philosophical question, when it comes to humans, what is natural and what is not. And is unnatural better when we watch the goals of humanity? There are millions of other living organisms on this planet and only humans wear clothes, go to shower, use deodorant and need sex education in school. And many other things, we live in artificial society, with artificial governance, rules, social norms and eat synthetic food and are surrounded by and even wear synthetic materials, plastic is everywhere and we are vaccinated with synthetic chemicals right after being born. Then again, this was not always the case, but emerged very recently. Humans used to live by the rule "kill or get killed, eat or get eaten", only rule being the survival of the fittest. That's "natural". Sometimes food was scarce and other people could hang a person for stealing food to survive. This was true nearly all of the 200 000 years of homo sapiens history and has changed only very recent times, mostly past 100 years.

Even if we look the closest relatives to humans, what they naturally do... chimpanzee males sometimes rape the females in their tribe. Chimpanzees sometimes engage in organized warfare against other tribes with which they compete for territory. A chimpanzee male, in a moment of rage, sometimes picks up a nearby infant, and crushes his skull against a rock. And they do on occasion engage in cannibalism, in spite of the fact that there is a plentiful supply of food from other sources.

So the term "natural" doesn't by itself mean good or bad. I myself like to think with with more like Friedrich Nietzsche -style scale, instead of good-bad axis, I'd like to use more like logical-not logical or beneficial-not beneficial axis. Things in human life are not getting any more natural, they are getting more unnatural. It goes to all levels of life, including workspaces. We just need to figure out that which of our synthetic and artificial means are the most salubrious to our existence and goals as a species, and keep developing them. Since there seems to be only one apparent "meaning of life" in addition to survival, and that is to develop, to evolve to higher levels. And only us humans can do it. We are related to all animals, even plankton and we share 50% of the same DNA with common garden snails, something like 99% with chimpanzees and all of them and including plants and we ourselves are the part of the same ecosystem, but we are the only ones not bound 100% to our genetic code because of our consciousness and are able to develop. We do what we must because we can. So technically, everything we do, all our chemicals and cities and offices are in a sense "natural".