Spore

In the Industrial Revolution, we designed machines to save us effort. Later, we created devices to save us time. The Holy Grail was to have the opportunity to spend more time with our family, to cultivate ourselves, to contribute to the community—in short to do what we wanted to do not what we had to do.

Early innovations saved us from backbreaking, lifespan-shortening work, but lately our inventions have taken an insidious turn. With the exception of a few miraculous medical tools, they now do us as much harm as good. The demands we make on ourselves in the face of our technology create stresses that literally kill us. The silicon chip, and cutting edge manufacturing have set a new pace for life on Earth, a pace better suited to our creations than it is to us. The machines we inhabit, the bodies we are, have vibrations, harmonics, rhythms and limitations that differ from those of our creations, but we often decide in favor of our creations rather than in favor of us. We have, in short, become slaves where once we were masters.

The solution became clearer than ever to me the other night when playing the new video game, Spore, with my 8-year-old son. Brilliantly conceived, Spore explains the process of evolution far better than I can. It involves creating a creature and helping it grow to meet the challenges of increasingly complex environments—to see it evolve from a single–celled organism in a primordial soup to a space traveler colonizing distant planets. The game reveals much about how the forces of nature act on us, and also the pressures we put on ourselves by letting our population run amok. To secure our place in the sun, we are driven to ever more competitive and ruthless behavior, and to use any tool and weapon we can find to survive.

What is a human being to do to find more meaning, less stress, greater fulfillment, and less complexity and speed? I was deep in the game when it hit me. I could decide against playing, bow out, and simply turn it off! What a metaphor for the world outside the personal computer. So obvious, so simple, so doh! but so few of us do it. Bowing out is an option that comes with increasing consciousness. It means to cooperate rather than contend, to use technology with awareness of its benefits and its costs, to emphasize depth, slow down, pay attention, achieve happiness by substituting spiritual goals for material ones. Be a person, not a bug! Let the spore of you fully flower.