Nature’s design has gone through cycles of change, evolution, and adaptation in pursuit of sustaining trillions of living beings, including humans. Going from the ice ages to the current, enduring climates changing, species changing, many of them distinct and yet nature continues with a perfect regenerative system that takes care of its inhabitants because nature itself complies with principles and laws that are foundational to life itself. Some of these laws include the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, interdependence, change, cause and effect, and more related to us humans the law of intentionality and its influence on our actions and the results of our actions. These laws and others like them are impersonal and work as they do. Nature thrives on them.

Humans too have changed, evolved, and adapted to changing environments, and pursued sustenance and progress for themselves. Though there is a considerable gap between nature’s evolution and ours.

Our evolution has manifested as an increase in our knowledge, innovation, and advancements, many of which do not respect these natural laws, are shaped by the false notion that having more things brings more pleasure and satisfaction and no ramifications. While beneficial innovation and production systems we’ve created in the last 50 years have quickly evolved to substantial capacities, they have also produced some significant ramifications. For example, generating more waste products and toxins than we or nature can properly dispose of. Hence, many of these advancements are created by people who had less understanding how natural systems and laws govern us humans too, and we’re not above them. That our happiness and prosperity depends on understanding and aligning with these natural principles.

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors were more closely present to and felt these natural principles. They respected and even feared nature’s laws. Perhaps to ensure humans didn’t ignore them, they came up with the notion of gods, and many of them. Gods and goddesses who represented something greater than the human and promoted virtuous acts and or induced fear to deter humans from destructive consequences.

Prophets, philosophers, and elders tried to teach humans about these natural laws, such as emphasizing that our actions have effects, or teach us about interdependence and respecting everyone’s health and happiness. Understanding of how life works however, was irrelevant to humans who were taken by the insatiable desire for power, dominating, taking, and owning more than others. Thirsty for new ideologies that empowered them towards better lives, humans took an even deeper turn away from natural systems and laws.

One way we can draw a line back to the root of current planetary and societal issues is to go back and see where humans took a wrong turn. The intersection where they branched out from natural living to “I can and will take what I want from nature,” was the need to be relieved from environmental hardships, territorial conflict with other humans, and realizing they could become free, comfortable, and happy. This pursuit of freedom and happiness didn’t pan out equally for everyone. Many continued ignoring some fundamental principles, if they could take more, dominate and exploit others, they did. As a result, inequalities kept growing. Depression, government controlling money and people having very little prospect to become free from under oppression. It is often in times of hardship that new ideologies and untested solutions flourish.

One of these solutions to achieve freedom and equality presented by economist, Milton Friedman, was capitalism (creating business and wealth), which was beneficial in few social economical aspects and was flawed in being one dimensional and ignoring many of nature’s laws. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, he emphasized that the goal of a business and its leaders is to create profit for its owners and shareholders.

In Friedman’s mind, this principle ensured a free society empowering its members to pursue their own advancement and happiness. However, while wealth could bring some level of happiness and independence, having greater wealth does not relieve one from the laws of interdependence. At the end of the day, we need people who can buy our products. We need resources to create products to sell to those who will give us more wealth. Even at the highest level of wealth, no one could ever be fully independent and live free of needing other beings. He pushed that the federal government should open the flow of money to people and grant loans, which they did to a point where people could get any loans, even if they were unsure, they could pay those loans back. He also pushed for competition, having to crush other players in the market in order to gain an even bigger market share and create more wealth. His didn’t warn anyone that as you crush others, you too can be crushed, which is just how nature works.

The Friedman doctrine or shareholder theory became widely accepted and practiced by corporations across America and the world from the 1980s to the 2000s. Implementing this approach to acquiring wealth across the world created a domino effect of financial ruin and by extension human suffering. In 2007–2008, when the financial crisis hit America and ruined so many lives, Friedman’s doctrine became highly criticized. His limited and one-dimensional strategy to wealth as the means to gain freedom proved impermanent and was crushed by two other natural laws: cause and effect and interdependence.

Decades later, we find ourselves living longer and longer and increasing the world’s population due to continued advancements. The World Meter shows human count increasing from 3 billion in the 1960s to 4.4 billion in the 1980s, and 8 billion in 2024. I list this to give you some context about the increased needs and increased burden on our environment. As we find ourselves with a tremendous amount of advancement in creating wealth and comfort through increased production and use of material goods, we also find tremendous amounts of stress related illnesses, anxiety, and suffering for humans and all beings on our planet. While this trend began with industrialization, it continues well into the digital era, unless each of us ask, what is wrong?

These outcomes are clear results of not fully understanding nature’s guiding principles and natural systems like cause and effect, intention impacting action, interdependence, change and impermanence. We make choices and take actions that are shortsighted, unwise and hard to undo. It is mind-boggling how we have gotten to the point where one individual’s sustenance relies on large amounts of things made out of synthetic and plastic and other single-use and non-degradable materials that also need packaging. From the food we eat to the clothing we wear, to health and beauty products, to transportation, housing, education, and all other aspects of modern living, we have and continue to produce unprecedented amounts of trash and waste products on a daily basis.

To undo these negative effects and continue advancement in alignment with nature, I propose Mindful Life Optimization, which is a detailed methodology to regenerate both humanity and our planet. MLO is short for Mindful Life Optimization, a model and method I have designed to optimize our lives and align with life’s intelligence, through understanding and training. I have categorized essential lessons, MLOLs, that cover principles, qualities, and skills under three domains of life intelligence: systems, planet, and humans. Since we’re on the topic of the issues our lives can cause for the planet, you can take an interest in the health and well-being of our environment in the planet domain of Mindful Life Intelligence.

MLOL: Reflection and Exercise to Develop Awareness & Care

Please pause a moment here. Take an inventory of your past seven days, or even the past two days. Reflect on how much trash and waste products it took for you to live your day. Then multiply that amount by even a small percentage of the eight billion people living on the planet, who consume as much. It’s a staggering amount, every day. No one knows they are paying to accumulate trash.

You may think, what else can I do? The fact is with all the effort scientists and activists make to educate people and change organizational systems to create more ecofriendly products, still lots of people in the world do not think of the stuff they buy as partly trash. Businesses continually tell us that we don’t have enough and are pushing people to get more. Our evolution cannot suffice with creating more systems that are faulty or ignorant of greater systems that govern all of life.

We are smart beings, but have lost some really important set of natural and mindful intelligence. We’ve carried on underdeveloped and oblivious to what we’re doing. But being underdeveloped and unmindful of Life Intelligence continues to cause us unhappiness and we seek to fix it by getting more stuff. If we want to live with less worry and stress, and not further jeopardize what sustains our lives, we must turn the pages of our lives without judgment, but with care and presence. Then develop the inner qualities and capabilities that might be weak or missing to help us navigate life with the same intelligence that nature has. It’s never too late to broaden our perspective and improve our work life by developing our Mindful Life intelligence.

When purchasing something, think: What I will be purchasing is partly trash, do I really need it? What will I do with the stuff I don’t use? Is it right to make someone else responsible for my trash? How will the whales and the fish in the oceans feel when they’re buried under my trash?

Having the same discussions with your children, family, and friends to raise awareness and concern into the collective consciousness, so that others may also see the wisdom of reducing their consumption of any sort and obtain more mindful life intelligence. Creating opportunities for oneself and others to develop an understanding of how life works and how our choices matter, learning more skilled ways of living, relating with compassion and being content with enable us to begin to close the gap of our human evolution to match that of nature’s.

Resources:

World Population by Year: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/

To learn more about Dr. Manijeh Motaghy’s Mindful Life Optimization model and lessons Subscribe to her email list: http://perfectlyhere.org

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