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A world we have created on our own...

Jun 30, 2013 1:59:00 AM / by Vu Long Tran

You always hear stories of someone struggling with stress in life, with the challenges that we each face in our everyday lives. But do we really need to be stressed and/ or depressed?

Get back on the horse and keep going
Some of these stories end with anxiousness, stress and even depression. Most of us have probably heard or know someone who has had depression. We may have even had it ourselves, and that's normal, however it's how we manage and get back from it that manners most. Just as the metaphor says if we fall off a horse seven times, we will get back up eight times.

Yet, through this all I wonder what it must have been like back in history, as far as the stone age.

Our basic human needs vs. What we have created for ourselves
When you think about this period, our ancestors main focus had been on the basic human needs. That is, food, shelter, family/ tribes/ communities, etc. (Refer to Maslow's hierarchy of human needs). There was no stress over are passing that exam, filling in your tax return each year, etc. Rather, it was ensuring that there was food available each day, a place to stay and weather oneself from the surroundings, and a family to feed and fend for.

I refer to what we see in our communities today as a layer that we have placed on top of our basic human needs. Where we may only see ourselves paper pushing, stressing, and thinking about things beyond the basic human needs. That's normal though, for once we have covered our basic needs that is when most (if not all) of us will start improving our standard of living in some way and/or at least have more comfort in the way we live our lives.

That's not to say this new layer is not good, rather we need to think about what truly manners and focus on what is important to us.

Additional thoughts:
This leads us into more questions, thus we can ponder that we do not have the answers to yet. That is, What is the role/ purpose in our lives? Are we finding there is something more to life than what we see each day? Is our role simple to reproduce and multiply? What does that mean in relation to the theory around the "Tragedy of commons"?

Vu Long Tran

Written by Vu Long Tran

Solutions Engineer APAC. ex-@Forrester consultant. Writing on #cloud #howto guides and #tech tinkering!