Individual

Who or what is an individual? Am I a sum of my parts or are we jigsaw puzzle pieces of a larger whole?

As a species we have often battled between individualistic and communal ways of life - which is better? Or rather, which is more suitable? Are individual needs more important or must importance be accorded to the larger scheme of things, of which we are all a part?

This can mean different things in different contexts and despite the inclination towards the individualistic school of thought for many of us, the current pandemic purportedly caused by the novel (thus far) coronavirus COVID-19 has got me to thinking that we are prone to switching between the two, picking and choosing when to place the interests of what we consider "ours" over the rest, or vice versa.

The question of self has bothered humans for as long as sentience has been a thing. The "I" of it being distinct from the externalities, "us vs. them", this is mine, that is yours. But we have no answers for it, or at least I don't.

I was recently introduced to the concept of a greater sense of self - not from understanding but from realisation. There is a world of difference between what is understood and what is realised. One understands the 3 laws of motion, but one realises that punching a wall hurts the knuckles. And the greater sense of self may well be my own left-leaning environmentalist ideology gravitating towards thinking of myself as being part of something larger than myself, not in the abstract sense of being a chess piece on God's board but of being a component of a living ecosystem - one that my conspecifics don't seem to give a second thought about while shitting on.

Now one might ask, what does environmentalism have anything to do with the definition of the individual (or the self)? I have been wondering about this for quite some time now and the reasoning I drew out for myself was that if I identify with my self as being my body, I would be incentivised to pamper myself - the self here being just the body. One might argue that the mind is part of this sense of self and it gets pampered too. Sure! But it ends there.

On the other hand however, if I identified with a larger sense of self - I am not just my body and my possessions, I am a cog in the planet. A worker bee that lives, works and dies for the beehive. Not for the queen or its kin. Now if I aligned my thoughts along those lines, I might eventually end up being the most planet-friendly person I know (I'm not entirely there yet. Might need to realise some more my sense of self! :P).

Coming back to the current viral pandemic, where we have as a species agreed (or been coerced into agreeing) that we don't always place our own needs/whims over those of everyone else, I am all the more convinced that the issues of climate change, biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystems can be solved, if the political will exists!

Are we to make ourselves out to be gluttons in a consumerist paradise, or components of a planet that has been telling us for quite some time now that we're burning down our own house? Mind you, in the larger scheme of things, climate change or not, the stochastic universe doesn't care. Human existence is not and never was the goal of the Earth and everything that preceded you and me on this planet. If we manage to royally fuck up the planet, we will undergo a population bottleneck or worse, extinction. Life on the whole will not end. Life will bounce back.

This is what I have been asking myself now for quite some time: Where do you draw the line between who you are and who you aren't? Are you your religious beliefs or lack thereof, the colour of your skin, the ideas you communicate to other people, the changes you leave behind when you are no longer there? Why do we draw lines on the beach sand and say, "This is where I belong, that is where you belong" when all that is constant is the rise and fall of the tide?

What is the difference between you and me? Nothing.