Red Queen
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep it in the same place.”- Lewis Carroll (Through the looking glass)
Here you can either be a businessman or a philosopher. A businessman would see it as: keep running, and you better be fast. On the other side, a philosopher would reply: there is no point in doing so, after all nothing changes….
1. The Rabit
The Red Queen Principle- this is actually an evolution hypothesis by Leight Van Veller, and it says that all species are competing though an evolutionary perspective, and the faster you run, the better you are, the more chances of survival you have. If you can’t adapt, if you are too slow, you are going to die.
Sounds familiar? Our modern world mindset is like that: more, better, faster, more, better, faster, more, better, faster… Always running, always chasing, always surpassing, always (almost) miserable.
Whenever I see people being in a hurry I think about chickensns, once you cut their head, the bodies are still moving. Headless chickens that is what we ended up being. Why are you hurrying up? You have everything you need for survival, and even more, actually, all this comfort is not really that good for us, more than ever we are depressed and obese. We are stuck in this mindset that something is chasing us, that something has to be done, that we must prove something. What? To whom? Why?
A general state of anxiety that is what life is for most humans.
Quicker or you’ll die
2. The cat
There is no mystery: we are born-we live- we die,” a light between two deaths”*. The only place you can get faster is death. For me, it seems logical, no matter how fast you run, you are going to be in the same place, your head. We build up all these intricate stories about who we are, what we are doing, and we adventure bravely into this place called reality that we filled with our fantasies. Man is a storytelling animal, and once you wake up after sleeping, you don’t stop dreaming you just change the background image, the set. The weird adventure with crabs chasing you in a desolated city goes on, but this time with “real-life responsibilities”.
If no matter how fast you run doesn’t determine the point where you will be, then you can take a pause and live.
*Radu F. Constantinescu
With love,
Alexandra
