Article written by Corneliu Bodea, CEO of Adrem

I am aware that it is a month of the year in which, on the one hand, the rush to try to complete what we have set out to do this year, and on the other hand, the need for peace and tranquility fully tempts us eager beings to cross another invisible but unanimously accepted border, such as the end of the calendar year. I am also aware that the expectations at this time are far too ambitious and this fact contributes to increasing anxiety, but nevertheless they come before you with a concern… cumbersome.

I’m going to talk to you next about an old concern, but one that is getting more and more avid around me, often making me think, namely, the extent to which we humanity are really advancing in the right direction. Of course, I have no claims to obtain a clear and definitive answer to such a problem, but I want to emphasize the importance of our action and the responsibility of generating positive context.

We talk so much about progress, about growth and development, we place the present times at the top of the series of epochs known to history, bringing arguments such as: the increase in life expectancy, technological development, comfort and security of life. It is undoubtedly relevant how many years we live, in what physical conditions, how many scientific unknowns we decipher and how far in time or space we can see. Our rational side sinks into contentment and confirmation and pushes us forward. But it is equally important, I would dare to qualify at least as important, what we feel about what happens to our time, to our soul, to the environment in which we live and to the future we are building.

As philosophically we learned from Spinoza and Kant, and scientifically from Einstein and Heinsenberg, what defines and surrounds us is relative rather than absolute. Thus, the progress we are talking about is mainly relative. Chocolate eclair is sweet and good, but nothing compares to the one eaten after a period of fasting…

With this clumsy explanation, I would refer to life expectancy, the time we live on this Earth, the security of life, comfort, the environment and what we feel inside. We live absolutely longer, but the years pass at a speed directly proportional to the volume of information to which we become permeable. We don’t know when a new year began and when it ends, the sensation we experience is that of condensation of time until the duration of a moment. We live in comfort, but cramped in confined spaces, breathing air full of pollutants, moving exclusively in gyms and fighting with weight gain. We are sure that we cannot eat a leu (if we do not take into account inflation…), but a nuclear war can destroy our race, or terrorism can evaporate the sense of security in any civilized city. We have only 4% of the total mammals on the globe wild animals, the rest being occupied by animals in farms and humans (34%), 99.9% of the species that have ever populated the globe are extinct today, with an extinction rate higher than 10,000 times the historical average natural rate, which qualifies our period as the second in pace after the famous Cretaceous extinction that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. We are experiencing unprecedented climate change as the speed of expression, we are increasing greenhouse gas emissions, although we have extremely ambitious reduction targets.

It sounds depressing enough and raises legitimate questions about the direction in which we are heading… If we ask ourselves the question of what we feel inside us, I think things are just as unhappy. It is, I think, the reason why the younger generations are increasingly putting the emphasis on what they feel and on emotion. Old forms of spirituality seem to emerge timidly and in this flow of consumerism an opposing current tends to emerge. We have become unhappy and detached consumption machines, that is, zombies to some extent.

I believe that a revolution is needed in which the pursuit of profit and technological development is mitigated by the sustainability of actions, by care for society and people, for their spiritual and mental well-being. A revolution in which values are audited and aligned with people’s ideals and not exclusively with their interests. As the most intelligent and self-conscious species, we have this responsibility!

This revolution can only be accomplished to the extent that everyone acts in his place. We talk about diversity and reject it, we declare ourselves responsible and consume irresponsibly, we complain about education, but we are not concerned with the souls of our children, but with their material needs.

Each of us is a creator of context around us, whether it is friends, family or in the case of leaders, thousands of people. The context created by us is composed with the one created by others and counts in the final result. Too few are those who can personally influence the resulting global context and they are usually people… whose intentions and interests are questionable. No one can ever oppose billions of people who build a positive context, based on universal values, who express their choice of beings, of responsible beings. These must make us feel like powerful active actors, capable of defining our own future through our actions.

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