All Progress is a Tradeoff
Nothing was good or bad
As we’ve learned over the past 28 days, our species has come a long way.
70,000 years ago,
we ‘learned’ to communicate about and understand abstract topics. Being able to talk about something outside the physical realm allowed us to cooperate more effectively in larger groups.
12,000 years ago,
we left our nomadic lifestyle behind and we were domesticated by wheat and rice. This led to a huge population increase but also spikes in child mortality and disease. We also traded our diverse diet of the forests for single crops for breakfast lunch and dinner.
4,000 years ago,
the first empires began to spread their influence and conquer. Western empires brought us our modern liberal value systems, democracy, culture and much more. We traded the lives of millions of conquered peoples for that.
500 years ago,
we separated ourselves from the limits of this planet. We began to see the limits of nature as challenges, not hard borders. We admitted ignorance of the big questions and began a quest to solve all of life’s mysteries and challenges. We found new ways to convert energy for our needs, new ways to farm for our needs, new ways to build for our needs, new ways to do everything for even just our wants. We traded our place as creatures OF this world to be creatures ABOVE this world.
Today, we sit at a new crossroads. Our only limits are the limits of physics themselves. We can keep making trades for new breakthroughs with ‘better’ lifestyles, ‘better’ diets, ‘better’ everything. So the real question all of us need to ask ourselves is…
What are we NOT willing to trade… ever?
None of these trades throughout history were made consciously. We looked at all the benefits of the ‘new thing’ without looking at what it cost us. And then once we realized what we lost, it was too late to go back.
Sapiens 2 Key Takeaways
Everything is a trade. Everything has a cost.
Somebody somewhere at some time paid for everything good we have today. Does that make it bad? Or does it just make it ‘history’?
Your Biggest Fan,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski
PS. Thank you for reading along this month. By reading each email, you now have 28 lessons from a 500 page book on humanity. You now know more about this history of the human species than 99% of the world population. Pat yourself on the back.
PPS. On Friday, we begin our next book. Keep an eye out for an email from me TODAY announcing the new book.