April 10th, 2024by David Freedman– Coral Reef Conservation and Biodiversity Awareness | Early Career Ocean Professional (ECOP)
My friends have always told me not to overthink. To me, that’s like telling someone not to think about purple elephants. I just can’t help it. I’ve accepted that it’s part of who I am. I’ve been able to turn it into a strength by facing challenges head-on and allowing me to analyze problems from multiple angles.
While some might call that “catastrophizing”, I prefer to look at it as a mental exercise or game, which allows me to be the Devil’s Advocate, and put myself in another person’s shoes while viewing their approach to hypothetical situations in an objective manner to decide the best potential course of action. Believe me, this game is not something all your friends would enjoy.
Playing this game once led me to a recent thought on how our instincts as a species are now comparable to how we were millions of years ago. What happened to that drive, that motivation, we used to have? What’s missing from our past that we now have in abundance? Are we just too happy? The mysteries that first caused us to venture out from the savannas of Africa questing for new lands and seeking answers in the murky depths have helped shape the qualities of the connections that have been established over the centuries. The Colossus of Rhodes, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and the Library of Alexandria all these marvels were built by the strength of our backs and the sweat of our brows. What once was past is now constantly being reshaped and reformed by our present, giving way to new and unknown futures. Instead of trying to predict the future; the fluidity, the choices, the direction, the paths of how we are to adapt will be inconsequential in the face of coming waves.
More than half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. Even as the market value for resources such as minerals, oil and gas, energy, sand, and the food supply chain rises, these have become dwindling reserves as we continue to take more and more without leaving any time or room for regrowth. If we take a quick snapshot at how economies are being affected on a macro level, more than 15–30% of coastal societies are already suffering, leading to a higher rate of market competition for larger international players. Our instinct to compete with each other is just another evolutionary response to our own species which forces us into the flight or fight response mode. When a bully comes after you with their friends do you fight or run?
Competition will only continue to grow fiercer as the battle for the survival of our planet will not only rely on how we can ensure true sustainable change but also on how we can leave it safely in the hands of future generations. So is there even a correct answer? Is moving to the Moon or Mars our best bet? Or perhaps.. is there a middle ground, a compromise?
Based on a 1998 Harvard Business Review article written by British politician and writer, Nigel Nicholson’s theory of evolutionary psychology, the current evolutionary process has recreated a crucial role in what led us to become the dominant species. However, there is always causality and effect, which come with choices, then actions, and finally, lead one to end up with the consequences of their actions. It just depends on whether or not we can see these consequences coming in time and if we’re able to consider the risk vs. reward ratio and take into account slippage, or in this case, comprehending what the X factor is.
To me, this seems, to be the sense of instinct that has guided us through troubled times as humanity constantly struggles to find its place on Earth. But does this mean that all we’ve been doing since we took our first bipedal steps ashore has been taking and not giving back to Mother Nature? Of course not. But is there a way we could assure the world that there is enough to share with everyone? Not just people but all the living and breathing organisms on land and in the seas?
As long as we don’t give in there is always hope. When people tell you to give up, that’s the time to stand your ground and fight. Action begets more action, just as change creates more change if we consider the snowball effect. What is severely lacking, is that we are actively choosing to lose our ability to motivate ourselves to evolve. Whatever it is that pushes us to mold our will into an unbending, unbreakable form that allows us to shape the world around us to how we wish to perceive it, allowing us to understand the difference deep within our bones that something is fundamentally wrong with this perspective and that you cannot change the world. Only live within it, be part of it.
What’s missing is our instincts, the topic of morality, or even our conscience as we may say out aloud that we are not ok with a subject or a topic yet nothing still changes, unless there is some form of action that is taken. Does this mean that we are even incapable of deciding to evolve for ourselves? We’ve been in survival mode for far too long and have been battling each other since we first began to divide the lands and the seas. In this, we’ve come to love what we do more instead of making a priority of loving ourselves first. The hard truth is, that being able to accept compromise means letting go of whatever it is that makes us comfortable by forcing us to do the uncomfortable thing and pushing us to go against our natural inclinations. To not do what our instincts are crying out for us to do, go against the grind. And letting go is not easy because nothing worth fighting for is ever easy.
I feel as though I am confident in speaking to the knowledge of my own individuality. The reason is that I have been struggling for the last year to restart my professional career from scratch. This struggle has given me the unique perspective to observe myself and those around me as I continue to push myself to change by giving myself a reference point. By doing so, I’ve turned this past year into an opportunity for developmental growth by opening myself and learning that letting go is a form of trust and recognizing that constantly blaming myself for outcomes that I have no control over will only make situations worse. Self-growth and self-empowerment are key elements to unlocking oneself as well as the people and the environment around us. This is why we are becoming too reliant on others and by making it difficult for us to reach deep within and find that instinct that we lost.
We’ve become comfortable that there are strengths in numbers by banding together since primal times. But the truth is we are far past the stage of having to bunch-up together to hunt for food. It’s been shown that there is power in the self-worth and recognition of the individual by the individual. While it’s the slow change, the crawling change; the one you see coming and still decide to do nothing that ends up leaving scars and chaos in its wake. Learning to grow, focusing on how to advance of your accord, without the need for any accolades or recognition, these are how one unlocks the next step in their evolution.
This doesn’t mean that grouping up and trying to solve our problems is necessarily wrong, working together does NOT mean that we’ve lost our edge. It just means that we’ve become too reliant on what makes us strong, and that is to evolve or adapt. Ever since the Stone Age, people learned to trust their instincts above all else, which led them to avoid natural disasters and wild predators. Understanding that we are only able to control ourselves instead of being able to control our outcomes around us is paramount to being able to separate confidence from reality, which is not intuitive. It is something we must teach ourselves to do while we venture out into the world by learning from our mistakes and being able to differentiate between what is right and wrong. How can we create a sustainable future that we can be proud of if our actions are incapable of speaking for themselves?
Thank you to the Center for Biological Diversity, Harvard Business Review, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Action Bioscience, and Microsoft Designerfor providing the valuable online resources and materials necessary for research and study.
