I like to smell this moss at work from time to time. There's a little gap in the plastic for your thumb to lift the top, but its a great little access point for my nose.
It suddenly occurred to me today just how dystopian it actually is. It's like the zoo equivalent for moss.
I had a flash vision pop into my head of a barren landscape, thousands of kilometres of concrete and glass, not a bird to be heard or a butterfly of which to take a macro photo. A lifeless, sterile, cultureless landscape of working citizens, staring at glass screens, scrolling and inputting data.
An infinite number of monkeys attempting to work themselves out of the mundane.
The monkeys' instincts call them to nature, but their duties as worker monkeys providing profit for the alpha leader up top quickly suppresses it all into the deepest corners of the few remaining cells of their body that listen.
The surrounding trees had been cut down, as their leaves were an inconvenience to sweep up, and falling branches could damage passing cars.
We can't have that
Plants were banned from the workplace as they encouraged flies and egg laying, and their requirement for sunlight meant they were usually near the window where they might fall off the balcony or, if inside, tip onto the floor and make a mess.
There are regulations against that
Mere paintings of trees and birds on the walls as a king of pseudo-compromise was considered childish, too bright and colourful and not conducive to a productive team at all... as we all know from the fact that all cars are all black and white now, and all buildings and phones are plain glass rectangles. It's better to be absolutely neutral to neutralise any discontent one might get from a group of humans with a variety of opinions.
The computer desktop background is of a beautiful sunset falling on an ocean horizon, but it was AI generated and doesn't actually exist and one's excel spreadsheet is permanently opened on top anyway. Even if closed, the desktop icons cover at least half of it and provide a clear reminder of its illusionary nature. In this life, it'll never be reality.
A monkey only gets a few days off a year to go to such places - at great expense - and in this country, the smog makes absolutely sure you'll never see the sun at a low enough angle to be considered a 'sunset'. A nice, cozy rug of grey coats the sky, instead.
This here monkey, however, had a solution. What if there was a plant that didn't need much sunlight, space, or maintenance, took up the smallest possible space, dropped no leaves and attracted no bugs?
A mighty boring plant, for sure. In fact, since acquiring this triangle of moss many months ago, the only change that has been identifiable is a slight browning of the occasional dying stem.
The higher authorities wanted the room to smell nice, but not offensive, so they put a tub of chemicals with wooden sticks in it on the desk to permeate the room with great strength. It's not an unpleasant smell, but entirely artificial. It's from Zara.
This monkey picks up his moss and takes a sniff through the thumb hole. Now that's a smell you can set your watch to. Each inhalation instantly teleports him back to his young monkey days of nature, ponds, chickens, flowers, adventures in the woods and swamps, views of majestic mountains and wild deer relaxing in the shade of ancient trees.
Was it all delusion, a dream?
As the monkey rests his eyes and ears from the white lights and background noise of honking trucks, the cleaner comes and casually sweeps the moss off the table into the trash.
It was nice while it lasted.
Ironically, it was the monkey's need to be an expert hunter gatherer that brought it to its apex status with intelligence. Then the monkey traded it all away for "security". There was a natural environmental pressure to be intelligent in nature as the monkey had to know what was safe to eat and where to go. This jack-of-all-trades attitude was traded for experts that are seemingly useless outside of their field of expertise. A diverse omnivorous diet for traded the security of the same bowl of grains every single day. The monkey traded a 4-5 hour workday for endless toil, but hey at least the monkey wasn't getting rarely eaten by tigers now.
To be fair, if I had to do the whole evolution thing again I'd probably take the same route, if the alternative was being eaten by tigers. But I do lament the expert monkey concept. Jack of all trades lifestyle just feels so much more respectable as a character, and much more interesting (Stephen Fry, for example)
I mean not only that, but the pressure is literally your intelligence. Forget that fungi is poisonous? Adios. Now our pressure is more dependent on resistance to pathogens that cross over from our domesticated animals.
Sure, the predator tiger thing happened, but car wrecks didn't. I bet the tiger thing was rare. (And you worked less!)
I guess it's one of those cognitive biases we make as an imperfect creature. We can visualise a lion ripping our liver out while we're still screaming and we associate that as being far more dangerous than whipping down a road and hitting the back of a truck at 70mph, where you don't really tend to imagine your lower jaw flying alongside one of your eyes through the windscreen (lol).
People in the educated and wealthy part of the world still live under the illusion that wealth = quality of life which, although is a contributing factor, doesn't do much to quell the needs of those spending $3,000 a month on a crippling whiskey habit. If we were more content to just be around a trusting village of people we trust, we'd never have a lot of the problems we have today. I think we were tricked into a lot of our beliefs and drives.
But oh well, here I am -__-
It's weird because everything about us neurocognitively is fitted to a circle of about 100 people. Grow beyond that and you need a story or fiction to hold it together (corporation, government, money, religion etc).
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