The Earth has no problem to provide 100 billion of us with all of our life’s essentials, including all the food and housing we need and that we are used to, as well as a system of education and upbringing for our children, and so on.
The experience of such a state as happy, pleasant and safe versus one of great stress and suffering depends solely on whether we can improve our attitudes and connections to each other.
What stands in our way to improve our attitudes to each other?
It is none other than human nature, i.e., the egoistic desire to enjoy for personal benefit alone.
Our egoistic nature pits us up against each other, blocking us from sustaining kind and caring relationships, and we thus feel an accumulation of problems and crises the more we develop and the more the population rises.
How, then, can we improve our attitudes and connections to each other?
To start with, we need to dispel myths about the need to reduce the human population, as well as those of trying to be satisfied with less.
Population reduction is no solution because we fail to see just how much each and every person in the world plays a role in absorbing a certain amount of burden that befalls humanity at any given moment. In other words, if humanity needs to endure X amount of suffering, then is it better that 2 billion people accept upon themselves that amount of suffering, or that it becomes dispersed among 8 billion people or more? Of course, if we saw what we were really dealing with, then we would treat each person in the world with a lot more importance than we currently do in our narrow egoistic vision.
Also, the idea of trying to be satisfied with less is no solution simply because our desires continuously grow, and at a certain stage, we will be unable to fulfill our growing desires by trying to be satisfied with less. Such an approach will backfire on us severely, as it runs contrary to human nature.
In order to improve our attitudes and connections to each other, and adapt ourselves to conditions that become all the more interdependent and interconnected from one day to the next, we need to apply ourselves to a completely different kind of education than we were raised with—an education that emphasizes how to connect to each other positively above our divisive drives, and how reaching positive connection among each other means balancing ourselves with the laws of nature.
That is the key to shifting our lives from our current divisive and tense course to one where we harmoniously connect as an interdependent and interconnected humanity.
Featured in Quora