Replying to Older generation and the state of humanity
Is it just me or are we as a species still very barbaric. We basically go about our day to day life with one thing in mind:
Sex.
Think about it. Everything else is just a means to that end. For example: studying leads to good grades, leads to a good job, leads to more money, leads to material wealth, leads to the opposite sex leads to reproduction.
I am not saying everyone on earth follows this particular trend, however the majority simply have no motivation to do anything other than to sustain life long enough to reproduce then dwindle away into senility and die.
I thought of this when watching my grandparents. As old as they are and with as much as they have seen, one would think they would always be up for an intelligent conversation. They have no thought provoking insight into how fast the technological world is progressing today in comparison with the past and where this might lead our species. I, being a live in member of their household, see it all the time. Their brains have become unfocused and discombobulated. Past the point of different ways to go about gifting charity funds, they are no longer capable of abstract thought.
It goes like this. I work and come home usually around 5-5:30 on many days. I will sometimes eat out however sometimes I prefer to sit and eat with them. G-pa, if you will, will begin by asking how was my day, a fairly honest question unless you consider he asks it every day and has no recollection of the previous days answer so he will usually conclude his interview with a nod and wander back over to his chair and newspaper. Dinner follows with voracious, lip smacking barbarism where my grandparents will huddle over their plate and just eat. No conversation, not even a look up. G-pa will usually say this (insert random component of meal) is very good. Sometimes he will say it twice in the same meal as if he forgot he said it the first time. G-ma will nod her head and proclaim what grocery she got it from, then both will noisily go back to eating. After this happened tonight I took a long hard look at them and thought a bit. Then quietly got up, washed my plate and sat down to write this.
Don't get me wrong; They are very nice people and have lived a long and mostly happy life. I can't get over the fact that there just isn't anything going in their heads anymore. No curiosity, no more wonder, no joy in knowing what speculation I may have on the future of intelligent life.
We are poised on inventing a revolution, I Biological revolution. One where we will not need to idly sit by and degrade after our reproductive organs have done their job. We will be fully capable of extending our comfortable life 12 decades and beyond. And after that we may not even need our soft tissue bodies as they were anymore. This is the transhumanist theory and i subscribe to it(well most of it) but I will not go into that here.
It's sad for me to see but my grandparents are probably among the last generations who will not be affected at least on some level by anthropogenic evolution.
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