Baby Steps

NAME: BABY STEPS

AUTHOR: VALERIE CONTERA-ROMERO

LOCATION: VALA_EXT-2

Baby Steps

From the introduction to Are We There Yet? Where We Came From, Where We're Going, And Why You'll Need Snacks, by Valerie Contera-Romero:

Sometimes people point at the last few hundred (or thousand) years of human history and say, look at how ugly it all is! Look at what a mess we've made! Maybe modernity was a bad idea, maybe we should stick to living like cavemen. And I get it, it *is* ugly and messy. But the mistake is thinking that where we are right now is the endpoint, that this is the adulthood of the human species.

I mean, try to apply what you know about human development to human history. Think about babies.

Babies are ugly. Admit it, we all know it, they look like tiny old people covered in mucus. They have soft heads! And they grow into children, tiny sociopaths with underdeveloped brains. And then they become teenagers, pimply self-righteous lunatics driven by hormones.

And then, slowly, if you're lucky, they gradually become adults.

The development of the human individual is always ugly and messy, but that's the point: it's development towards something. The same applies to humanity as a whole. On a geological scale, we've barely just come into existence. We've gotten through the baby phase, just about survived our childhood, but we're barely teenagers. Stopping here would be disastrous, and a betrayal of everything that we could still become. We may feel the weight of history on our shoulders, but this is just the prologue. To put it in pop culture terms, we haven't even made it out of the tutorial yet.

Just because it's all pimples and hormones and frustration right now doesn't mean it's never going to change.