Asha Amemiya, in The Abundance of Less by Andy Couturier:

“So, why do you think so many people get caught up in this [drive for convenience]?”

“I really don’t know,” she says, laughing, although perhaps somewhat bitterly. “I wonder why it is? Maybe it’s just that humans are that kind of animal; they don’t really want to move toward satisfaction.”

”Humans are that kind of animal.” I have a theory that’s something like this.

The Christian creation/fall story says that the sense of wrongness in the world is due to the sin of Adam and Eve. Because of their disobedience to God’s command, humanity is cursed—and the rest of the cosmos with them.

I also feel that sense of wrongness (“this is not how it’s supposed to be”) that lies at the root of the Adam and Eve story. It would seem that many other people in many other cultures also feel it, given that something like a fall story exists in other cultures around the world.

In my theory, I take the sense of wrongness as a given but I am not convinced that it exists beyond humanity. In other words, humanity has a problem but the cosmos does not. What if humans just are that kind of animal? What if humanity evolved in some way that was reproductively beneficial but broke humanity relative to the rest of the cosmos? What if the incorrigibility of humanity gave us a temporary advantage (we’ve taken over the world, after all) but is, in the long run, an evolutionary dead end and will lead to our extinction?

If this is true then it’s not (as in the revivalist hymn) that this world is not our home; it’s that we have forgotten who our family is.