Yesterday went to the mall for the first time in years. My wife has pretty much banned me from going to them because, well, I can’t behave in public. This week though we are being visited by our good buddy Tyler, which is why I’m on vacation, and he wanted to check out Annapolis mall. I’m not sure if it was because of it being Monday, but there were very few people there. Even more disturbing was the number of empty spaces, you see Annapolis used to be the go to mall in the area. Every store was running a sale, most 40% off or near to it. Pretty much begging people to purchase. Which lead to a discussion about the death of the shopping mall, and how the system is broken….
Technology is ever adapting. New ways are found every day to get us our information quicker, increase efficiency, list goes on. More people shop online than go into stores. More and more stores are going with self checkouts, replacing human employees with computers. Warehouses (like Amazon) are run with the bare minimum of human staff and mainly relies on computers and robots to fulfill your order. In other words technology is removing the human element from jobsites. For CEO’s, stockholders, and other executives this is good thing. Less people you have to employ, the more the profits role in. What they’ve failed to see is the long term ramifications this will have on the economy. They’re pretty much gutting the house while leaving the outside looking like a model home. Remove too many support structures and it all comes collapsing down. The more jobs that go to a non-human, the less jobs there are, meaning at some point there’s no way for people to afford buying from said store (online or brick and mortar).
The economy is a circulatory system. Money is meant to flow through it like oxygen enriched blood to feed the cells then return back to re-oxygenated again (in other words people make money to spend it so others can now make the money to spend it again. Money is supposed to constantly change hands). The current mentality of most businesses is like that of a leech. Suck as much blood as you can, get fat, and don’t care if you kill the host doing it. Remove enough blood from any living thing and they will die. Remove enough money from the economy and put in vaults and sooner or later it will die just the same.
This mentality goes far beyond just that of money though. Look at how humans treat the earth. We take and take and take, but how much do we give back? We have no issue mining for minerals or drilling for oil or destroying forests for our short term needs. There are plenty of alternatives out there. We go back to how technology keeps improving. Our mindset though is still stuck in the same vein as it was in 1920. We still use gasoline burning engine cars to get around just as we did when Henry Ford first introduced the automobile. We still burn coal for energy. We have ways of harnessing the power from a giant battery in the sky and we refuse to make it mainstream. We don’t even let our dead bodies go back to the earth to replenish the nutrients we’ve taken. Instead we put them in air tight metal boxes to preserve a lifeless shell. Why? Goes right back to the mindset that is killing the economy- There’s no money in long term solutions. Greed is killing all aspects of how we live, and most importantly where….
I don’t care if the Hubble telescope has found multiple planets that look to be earth like, there’s no way for us to get there right now. We need to focus on keeping the only home we have inhabitable. We need more long term thinking, stop focusing on individual gains and on communal survival. If not nature will step in… Earth doesn’t need to humans to survive. Through our short term thinking and greed we’ve already raised the CO2 levels to 400ppm (came out last week), plenty of air for plants but not good for humans or any other life form on the planet. We need this planet. My fear is it’s going to take a major catastrophe before we’ll wake up and stop being the parasitic creature we’ve become. The big question is will any humans survive to actually learn the lesson….
Mind of Morandir 