PROJECT TWENTY-THREE

Sorry, folks, but I disagree. Just look at this wonderful picture of our world! Now, how could you possibly have trouble living in this world?

Now, if it were really all that hard to live in this world, how would anybody ever have any time left over to invent religions or do scientific stuff or waste time going to war with each other or put up web sites onto the Internet?

Anthropological studies have shown that savages in the jungle spend an average of nineteen hours a week supporting a family of six: mommy and daddy and four kids. Now, if a tropical jungle has enough easily available resources to make living this easy, how could life be hard?

Well, I'll admit that your needs are modest in the jungle. Just sit around all day eating bananas and coconuts. The most stylish clothing you're likely to ever need is a zebra hide loin cloth. A thatch hut will do for a house. A poison dart blowgun will protect you from dangerous animals.

So now that we've used our free time to invent civilization, we've gotta have big huge fancy expensive houses to hold all our furniture. And we've gotta have lotsa furniture to fill up our houses, thus necessitating even bigger houses. And we've gotta have big expensive cars to drive around. And we can't drive our cars unless we pave over lotsa big wide roadways that take up lotsa space so we hafta live farther apart and drive farther to get there, thus necessitating paving over more and more roadways.

Now you realize, of course, that the human species is designed to live within certain climate zones. If we were smart enough to know our place and stay there, life would be sweet. But we can't be satisfied with our rightful place in the world, so we've invented expensive heating and air conditioning systems to conquer portions of the world where we have no business living. And what's more, every crowd has got a few satanic cultists who insist on dumping God's seasons upside down by overheating their indoor spaces to suffocating extremes in the winter and air conditioning them down to a bitter chill in the summer.

Basically, it looks to me like life was too easy for folks back in stone age times, with only nineteen hours a week needed to support your family. So we had to invent civilization just to give ourselves enough to do.

So enjoy life! It's not as hard as you imagine!