Man vs machine?🦼

While you are reading this you are looking at a machine, I typed this on a machine, when you get food from your kitchen you are surrounded by machines in the form of a fridge, oven, toaster, microwave, blender, milk-frother,…

Then of course there are more stereotypical ones that pop up in our heads if someone is talking about a machine like, a robot or a forklift, big industrial machines or even a Transformer J

Technology is literally everywhere.

And it sometimes scares me a bit to be honest.

Not in the sense that I am standing in front of the dish washer and biting my nails because I’m afraid that it’ll jump on me.

I don't have a problem with small machinery that is a part of our everyday lives, but with the technology that alters us and our behavior as humans drastically,

like:

🔰seeing kids in elementary school at the age of 7 walking along the street alone and staring down at their phones and not running along with their friends,

🔰knowing that if the power went out for a long time that we’d be federally – bamboozled

🔰knowing that we are so dependent on technology that so much knowledge about how to grow food,

🔰how to read the stars and tell direction,

🔰how to process herbs and natural ingredients by hand

🔰or to make clothes out of cotton and wool without the help of a machine.

🔰Or even something as trivial as online-dating to replace going out and interacting with people.

These once common knowledge and practices are not used or known by many people anymore.

I mean, I don’t know some of it either.

💠I couldn’t tell a poisonous mushroom from an edible one,

💠or find my way through a huge forest by looking at the stars or telling south from north and north from west by checking out which side of a tree the moss is growing on - or however you tell.

💠or cultivate a plot of land with seasonal produce on the right soil and pick the appropriate, natural fertilizer.

There are of course some things that you learn like,

🎈making certain crafts and telling apart different plants in elementary school,

from an aunt that has a huge vegetable garden,

or your father who shows you how to fish.

🎈I have learned natural home remedies from my mother and my gran, so I know what to do when I have a cold or a fever,

🎈I have learned from them how to sew together small holes in my clothes or how to cook and bake.

🎈my gran always told me the names of trees, or which plants you could harvest and use for cooking.

🎈my mom and my best friend’s mother taught me how to plant flowers and herbs so that they grow just right.

🎈I was taken on long hikes and bike rides by my father and was taught by him how to swim – so all certain forms of self-powered movement.

🎈I know what cows look and smell like in real life and I can ride a horse.

But I think that that is still far from enough.

And I am only so fortunate to have learnt many of these things because I have a grandmother who still has knowledge like that and because I grew up in the countryside.

But what about kids who never learn any of this?

Who will teach them if even other people around them don’t have that knowledge anymore.

Then of course you will resort to the tools that you have and know:

🎲Buying a new shirt online if an old one has a small hole.

🎲Asking Siri about the name of a tree.

🎲Looking at google maps for every turn and getting lost if there were ever no signal.

🎲Taking antibiotics every time flu season is there, instead of resorting to natural remedies and cold wraps that will support the immune system to fight of a virus and make the body stronger.

I am not saying that we should ban all technology and go back to the stone age,

But I think that it is dangerous and not natural for us to be so dependent on it.

We humans are made to move and run and to harvest and grow things with our bare hands and loosing that connection with nature and ourselves has such a negative impact.

🌲The less we use machines, buy stuff or take cars instead of walking, biking or even horse riding (I know that this is a little out there for nowadays standards, but just look at the Mounties in Canada!),

the less energy we need from power plants or coal.

🌲The less industrially produced fertilizers we use and resort to natural ones the less of a toll that takes on the environment and us.

🌲The less mass production of clothes and food there were

if we generally did it in a less money-oriented, speedy, machine-powered way,

the less we could produce and we wouldn’t have to through away half of it because it’s not used.

I think you get what I am saying.

I personally think that is far more rewarding to watch something grow, that you have planted with your own hands,

Something that is pure and unpolluted where it’s growing process follows nothing but the intended natural cycle does not aid in world-pollution.

🌱🌊🌳Technology and machines just don’t fit into that natural cycle and we should really turn to nature again and do things in the natural rhythm, because it is best for all of us.

It has come to a point where people feel unsettled walking through a forest when they see that their phone has lost bars.

Nowadays people rely on technology more than nature-and that is not natural.

Ok, breathe here,…and don't start calling me a hippie. -Thx😉

Last thing: I am also a little scared that people who are not as connected to nature as some,

are not understanding or concerned about loosing more of the natural world because they have never built a connection to it and don’t have the urgency to protect and restore it.

What do you think?

What is the general attitude in your close circle regarding this topic?

Send me a DM on my instagram @thrive_bynature if you’d like to share.

See you next time👋

XX Stella