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How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?
I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.
Observation:
Conclusion:
This observation doesn't have to lead to that conclusion.
The world is the world. You likely won't fix it by yourself. But nature, society and civilization are emergent properties of aligned collective effort by sentient individuals. So, yeah, your efforts won't do anything on their own. But, find like minded people, set up systems, and get things moving in a one direction. Over decades and generation you will see it become the next version society, nature and civilization.
The way I frame it, is to focus on actions instead of outcomes. Plan your actions to best achieve the outcomes. Readjust your actions depending on how badly your previous actions have missed the target outcome. But, don't place any importance on the outcome itself. You have agency, but you do not have determinism. If the action was right, given the information you had, then you did will. The world is the world, it is going to throw unforeseen wrenches in the works.
You have agency, but you also have limited time. Identify your circle of concern and put in effort to help those people & initiatives navigate around nature. But repeated navigation around nature leads to desire paths that eventually becomes the roads that facilitate the future of nature itself.
An awareness of this helps you stomach losses and failures more easily. A resignation to it leads to Nihilism.
Sounds a lot like Indic religions and the 'dharmic' way of life. Both tie the concept of 'harmony with nature' to 'ego-death'.
Most Indic religions can be notoriously hard to capture in short quotes. The diversity of philosophical schools and the the prioritization of metaphor over specifics is not conducive to concise expression. But, newer Indic religions that take Abrahamic inspirations do a better job of being concise and grounded in their claims. In that spirit, I quote Guru-nanak of Sikh-fame.
Strictly/rhetorically speaking you've caught me slipping, but more colloquially I think you follow my logic. Immutable doesn't mean that we have no free will or our free will is unable to bring about any change, but rather that even if you can lift a rock, when you stop lifting it, it will fall back to the ground. A slightly more meaning example/metaphor may be that, if I'm a monkey, and I don't want to be eaten by a tiger, I could learn to climb trees, or perhaps even set up specialized roles within a communal system with other monkeys so one or two scouts alert the rest of approaching tigers while everyone else create tools to hunt down the tigers. But that only applies to my tribe. If a rival tribe's monkey or antelope gets eaten by a tiger, it really does me very little good to lose sleep over it, especially if the other monkey can easily copy my tribe but chose to nap instead. Except this simple cause-and-effect and reap-what-you-sow system breaks down when the tribe of 20 monkeys grows into an ecosystem of a city of a million that's subject to state oversight at 10 million and federal oversight at 350 million, and even if you are keen to set up a scout against the tiger, others can brazenly defect, and when you get too zealous about shooting a tiger yourself, a pack of mules from a far away forest issues you a consent decree to avoid systemic prejudice against the oppressed tigers.
Fascinating. Thanks for the insight, though I do not fully understand just from the quote.
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