The difficulty of innovation is that the lion’s share of knowledge is predicated on past experience as opposed to future intuition. We think back and look back because that is where clarity lies and then attempt to project that clarity into a foggy future. I mean not to condemn this way of thinking or force a shift away from a historical analysis of one’s present situation. Our possible homo sapien ancestors from the pierolapithecus to the homo erectus took hundreds of thousands if not millions of years to develop new ways of thinking and surviving purely by learning from the past. However, modern man has accelerated this course of change via an indomitable desire to gaze into the future, an unfettered choice to evolve.

As much as some may try to Darwinize human existence as one rung in a ladder of ever-evolving apes, there is something particularly human that allows us to look forward as opposed to purely backwards. I would argue this ability is the primary catalyst that allows us to evolve our lives, environment, and surroundings so rapidly, while those of our ancestors' past changed increment by increment over millions of years. This ability to look forward is what allows humanity to step into the unknown in brazen belief. But even for humans, it does not happen enough. We revert to our ape ways of clinging to the mediocre of the past as opposed to pressing forward to the incredible of the future. The British Empiricists like George Berkeley and John Locke stated that all we know comes from our senses; the start of all knowledge is empirical. This would suggest that all thought is predicated on past experience. While this can be taken as true, it is the human ability to rapidly transform past experience into future innovation that has made us the species we are today. Our evolution is now in our own hands and not the hands of shifting tectonic plates or changing tides like those of our ancestors. Push forward; it is the human way.

-Charlie, December 2024