There are only two building blocks for all that we do and create in life: what we get from nature (sun, earth, water, plants and animals) and, what we get from humans (attention, ingenuity, effort…).
That’s it! Only two core building blocks1 and this is not an exaggeration. Look around.
As an example, I’ll list out the building blocks for planning my week using my linen-bound notebook:
- Me
- My body, time, attention; which are impacted by my emotional, mental and physical state
- My planner
- Designs that humans came up with, using knowledge passed down from others plus their own creative riffs +
- Computers to design and exchange information; also built from a combo of human and natural resources +
- Paper and cloth from plants +
- Manufactured in factories that were built by humans using their creativity using resources mined from earth +
- My mechanical pencil
- Made of plastic, rubber, metal, graphite and clay. Each of these parts is an amalgam of materials extracted from earth.
- Bought online
- Used the internet, ecommerce and shipping infrastructures humans built using the same two building blocks repeatedly
I’m keeping it high level because we can double-click endlessly with just this one example and find these two core building blocks everywhere. Seen with this lens, every physical artifact of human life starts appearing like a fractal2, built from the recurring partnership between natural and human resources.
And what’s a core feature of these resources? Some of these building blocks are non-renewable (like minerals and time) and others renewable (like trees and human attention). However, being able to renew something doesn’t mean being able to renew it automatically or immediately. It means that replenishment is possible over time and under certain conditions. If we keep chopping that tree repeatedly or keep binge-watching Netflix day after day, neither tree nor attention will replenish.
So, given our absolute dependency on these two building blocks for literally everything we do and create in life, it’s surprising that we don’t hold them more sacred.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”― Wayne Dyer, author and speaker
- Nature is really the core building block because humans are also a part of nature. Even so, it made sense to call us out separately because we have an outsized influence on the planet.
- Fractals are infinitely complex never-ending patterns that appear similar at various scales. Snowflakes, tree branches, and coastlines are examples.
