Ecological Self
People often say follow your heart but you wouldn?t tell a psychopath who gains pleasures through the suffering of others do you? That is how I feel at the moment. I want to make art but I constantly worry about the ecological damage it has by supporting industries who goes out to ruin the natural world. When I look at any tools or buildings all I see are the materials it was made out of and their carbon footprint. I tell myself this fear is irrational since all living creatures will use and abuse their natural environment to harvest resources. Humans as a species aren?t any different. Also since I believe the universe is indifferent and apathetic (hence a lack of metaphysical morality) there is nothing fundamentally wrong to use the resources to create tools which in turns helps me make my art. But at the moment it feels very ?wrong? to make art when I know it indirectly hurts the environment.
My motto in life is ?Live simply so others may simply live.? It shouldn?t require me to kill the planet and contribute the daily extinction of different species in order to live my life. Hence forth the only way I believe I can live ?morally? is to stop listening to my heart. It is very painful to not creatively express myself through art but to me being right and moral should be a painful thing even if it causes me unhappiness on a daily basis. What is worse is not only am I judging harshly against myself I am growing a strong disgust for humanity aka misanthropy. I constantly tell myself that if I was born 20 years earlier or another part of the world I would have been blissfully ignorant of the negative feedback loop we created with our ecosystem. That people are not perfect and not efficient at what they do. I would have no quarrels living my life and creating art. Instead my feelings just get warped as I see people on a daily basis either smoking their cancer stick, getting drunk, or litter my street. All human tragedies to me are a win in my book because the less humans there are, the less pressure there is on the environment. Also I believe human deserve the very suffering they cause upon themselves including myself. Because of this poor attitude is making me harder to create meaningful relationship with people when all I see are their ecological flaws.
I am not responsible on how humans are mistreating the planet. That I cannot change their human nature or prevent the collapse our post-industrial society or save the world even. But I allow the problems of others create a neurosis within me. The closest thing to a western religious sense I do feel is being an ecological sinner. That I am a murderer everyday for simply living and that I fail at changing human being behaviors. I thought that if we are such self-aware beings we should have been able to peacefully coexist with the natural environment. Instead we killed off half of the world?s animals/species, poisoning our oceans, contribute extreme climate change, fill our soil with garbage and mass consumerism, slavery, etc. We are very much like a bacteria in a petri dish as it will consume it resources and than collapses through self-destruction.
So now I don?t know what to do with my life besides waiting for me to die and witnessing humanity demise. I feel like I should live in the woods again or join a sustainable community but since I am raised as a modern person I cannot let go the convenience despite the apparent poison it presents. Every time I pick up a pencil I get a case of a mild panic attack.
That's quite an analysis of both your personal struggles and your assessment of mankind. It's pretty sobering, which is obviously the point. Kudos for trying to make sense of it all.
But, your post also sounds like a call for help. You are in a self-imposed creative and inter-personal paralysis. It is self-imposed because it is you who have selected and adopted the particular set of moral and ethical standards by which you judge yourself and life itself.
I can only offer a pitifully insufficient observation about your outlook that you might give some thought to as a way out of your quagmire. Sometimes, real, honest self-assessment and analysis is too painful to face, let alone modify. It's much more satisfying - at least in the short haul - to look outside ourselves and pass our harsh judgement elsewhere. In fact, the harsher the judgement, the more grandiose the target.
For one person, parents, teachers, bosses, spouses and friends are convenient targets of those barbs. But for others, nothing but all of mankind will do. But, not just mankind against himself, which would be ok since he deserves it, but mankind against the universe to which mankind owes his very existence and has done him no wrong!
Maybe, just maybe, you have been unfairly treated. Maybe you blame yourself for your predicament and can't get past the guilt and shame to deal with all that. It's just too painful. So, you find a bigger target separate from yourself and sling your arrows at the beast to punish it for being you.