You cannot purchase a meaningful existence
A thought on the blueprints of our lives
You cannot purchase a meaningful existence. You can only live a meaningful existence.
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The era of striving for industrialization, technology, and progress has come to an end. These markers of human civilization are now part of our DNA. We have transformed this planet—for better or for worse—into a playing field for human aspirations. We tamed nature by reducing it at scale, and the days of being afraid of beasts lurking in dark forests are long gone. We paved over the dangers of this world—real or imaginary—we built our urban fortresses, and we retreated into our digitized realities.
What is the blueprint of our lives? The ancestors that set us on the train of industrialization, technology, and progress aspired to improve their lives: have enough food in their bellies, a warm shelter over their heads, access to medicine to alleviate their pain, and safety from the unpredictable forces of nature. They wanted knowledge to understand the mysteries of the universe, and freedom to pursue their dreams. We have achieved all that and more. So what comes next?
The emerging blueprint of our technological age is not built on human flourishing. It’s built on optimization and efficiency in the use of all natural resource—our planet, our ecosystems, our labor, our data, our energy—so that we can produce more for less at a faster pace. At the end spectrum of a human civilization as remote as possible from its biology, lies manufacturing and consumerism: a devouring anxiety of wanting to fill the void of our untethered existence with things made from manipulated matter and biology.
As the production line speeds up, the slingshot of progress will hurl humanity toward its extinction, replacing chaotic biology with a superior form of being, free to spread across the universe where it can continue to extract and exploit with technological efficiency and optimization—turning matter and life into products consumed by digital existence.
But life cannot be an abstraction of life.
You cannot manufacture a meaningful existence. You cannot purchase a meaningful existence. You can only live a meaningful existence.
Imagine embracing once again the gift of our natural lives and using technology and progress to turn this Earth into a paradise that supports planetary life in all its magnificent beauty and diversity. Imagine using technology and progress to immerse ourselves into our ecosystems, reconnect with the planet and all other living beings in peace, and become of this world once again. Each of us in our unique forms of existence, in these bodies that are born, grow, and one day perish. How beautiful is this life, how amazing that you get to be you this one time in this vast universe.
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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical companion to my debut climate fiction mosaic novel There Is Hope (spring 2026) now available for pre-order.
Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu