The Human Zoo: Escaping Our Self-Made Cages and Rethinking Our Natural Ways
A call to rediscover our nature and why thinking about our natural way of being really matters today.
📢 QUICK UPDATE: Starting this month (July 2024), #ANEWWITHTHEHUE will be a once-a-month edition. I want to bring you more quality curations that deserve your time and attention, so the monthly release will allow me to condense only the best of the best from each month for you to enjoy at your leisure. It’ll be with you every last Saturday of each month, so stay tuned for the next one on July 27! You’ll continue to receive these newsletters twice a week. I am having a lot of fun experimenting. It’s been so much fun to write and create for you each week. Thank you for sharing this space.
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The video above is my little treat to you this week. Take a moment to sit in a quiet space or with your noise-cancelling headphones on, at least to enjoy the beautiful sounds of nature. I captured this moment almost three years ago, but I often return to it to reminisce about the serenity, honesty, and absolute brilliance of nature doing its thing.
Whatever happened to just going with the flow?
In post-industrial societies, an obsession with schedules and structures has become the norm. Beyond the sun’s rising and setting, the way the modern world operates is mostly manmade.
Concepts like time, clocks, and the nine-to-five work weeks are all conditioned concepts passed down through the generations. We live in skyscrapers, modify crops, engineer foods, and exist within concrete walls.
We’ve created a labyrinth of distractions: content, scrolls, things, alcohol, money, and more, while we deeply yearn to reconnect with nature. The ever-blossoming demand for flowers and houseplants as we attempt to recreate nature at home reflects this longing.
Of course, these manmade ways of organisation have been advantageous, but when we look at the world today, are we still doing what’s best for our species’ survival? We are part of nature, yet we are also the most notorious destroyers of it.
Have we lost our way so much that entire industries must remind and support us to be more human? However, some of us are recognising that something doesn’t feel quite right anymore.
What does it really mean to be human?
I often wonder what being human means without these manmade constructs. If the facade of our timekeeping, systems, infrastructures, and materialism fades, what remains of humanity without these artificial ways?
The billion-dollar self-help and wellness industries and their peripheral subcultures, such as therapy, healing, organic produce, and self-discovery retreats, thrive because people seek to reconnect with their humanity. But why doesn’t being human come naturally to us anymore?
Is this trend telling us something? Despite being on this walk myself, I question why humans need so much help just to be ourselves. I am still learning how to be more myself, too, to connect with my humanness. But why is it so hard for us humans to be human?
