🌰 we create our predators
Today I’m thinking about spiders. A spider spins a web mere inches from a human and thinks nothing of it. There are predators a spider has control over: toads it can run away from, birds it can hide from, some spiders can even bite human predators. But on some level…the world is too vast and some predators too powerful. There’s no defense against the vacuum cleaner arm. A snail cannot avoid the careless boot. As a human, it’s hard to imagine a world where giants can, at any point, vacuum you up for no reason other than we made a corner of their property look unsanitary and unfriendly. Or a giant eagle swooping down to gobble us whole while we grab coffee with a friend.
But….we do have giants and eagles of a kind. At any point you can lose your job through no fault of your own. And while you can do some things to mitigate the effects of that, most people1 would be devastated. The same can be said for a sudden unexpected healthcare cost. A loss of resources can drive someone into homelessness, which becomes a cycle of “no address to put on job applications” -> “no job” -> “no money to put a roof over your head” -> “no address…”. Even zooming out beyond the personal level: the National Bureau of Economic Research2 found that those who graduated during a recession saw a decreased income for the next 10 years.
The difference between us and the spider is: we create our giants. Healthcare, careers, education, laws, politics, and home ownership are all concepts of our own creation. When selling weed puts you in prison for life3, that’s a socially created eagle swooping down from the sky for no reason other than we put it there.
Natural predators, while devastating to the individual, can be healthy for an ecosystem. Can the same be said of the ones we create? What would it look like to dismantle our self-made predators?
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Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.
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