Within the past year, I underwent a personal transformation following a severe mental health crisis that forced me to briefly withdraw from school. I found therapy in the most unlikely of places: stories.
I read books on the human condition. I found companionship among patients at the hospital as they poured their hearts out in an unfamiliar “language”: emotion. I learned to craft my own story using bits and pieces of this novel “dialect”.
It’s a humbling experience to find oneself in the lives of strangers, so to speak. I used to feel a twinge of humiliation at my insignificance when told “You’re not the only one who’s felt this way”. Just another statistic of many. In fact, it can be used as a learning experience.
Even in a STEM major, one soon discovers the significance of interpersonal skills. What good is it to operate within earthquake-proof buildings, shielded from new infectious disease strains yet to be discovered? I’ve often been told in my courses that the world we fantasize operating in is not an ideal, closed system. So chances are, your engineering efforts will fail without human feedback. Human experience is the best teacher.
We’ve been conditioned to have an “us against them” mentality. Yet, discussions of the Anthropocene considers humans as a single species. Blind to race, social standing, religion, and gender. Where once we prospered through cooperation, we now live in a world crumbling from competition. Neo-colonialism, poverty, capitalism–all at the expense of the same Earth we call home.
Why then, must we continue living similar iterations of one story line across space and time? Why not learn from the past and from one another? Perhaps avoiding a tragic end to the Anthropocene is not a matter of environmental sustainability. It’s a matter of social sustainability.
Graphic Credits: http://bit.ly/2kzFidQ, http://bit.ly/2hZq7d0, http://bit.ly/2i01LzW