Mastering the universe while losing ourselves

This morning I read a small passage from a book that I found interesting. So this is a book from 1960 about just being successful. And interestingly it starts with a little page about the fact that humanity has learned how to master its environment, has learned to master matter, control the environment and control how things are shaped and transformed. We build roads, we build rockets, we build planes. We are about now to visit Mars. That wasn't on the planning at that point in time. So the moon was the target at the time.

But the author writes something interesting there. Basically says that while we are busy mastering basically the entire universe, we fail to master ourselves. We fail to control the way we live, control the way we think, understand the way we think. And that is quite interesting because that's a book from the 1960s. And at that time, there were no smartphones, there was no internet, there was no TikTok, there was no Instagram, there was no Twitter, X, whatever. And still at that time the author realized that humanity was basically mastering the universe while losing themselves and becoming slaves of the technology that they invented.

So instead of having that mastery leaving us with more time and more capacity, capability to exploit our brains and our minds, we actually enslaved ourselves through this mastery of our environment. And if that was already true in the 1960s, how true is it today? That's quite interesting. And it makes me think about my kids and the fact that they are like zombies in front of things like TikTok and they don't even realize that it's enslaving them. It's turning them into slaves and to them it's not the case because to them it's just fun, it's instant gratification.

But in reality, that's really what it is; it's turning people into slaves. So it's quite sad that while we are mastering our environment and shaping the world in different ways, we enslave ourselves at the same time through the technology that we create. And so it got me thinking about what can we do to just revert that or reduce that or at least do something better for ourselves.