With all the suicides in the news the topic of people feeling alienated in the world is all over the place. There was a rather profound observation I read recently from a nature writer, Michael McCarthy, here's the gist of his point:
Why do we sometimes feel euphoria outdoors and (aside from sex) rarely indoors? Because being IN nature is in our DNA....here's a quote from Mr. McCarthy: They are surely very old, these feelings. They are lodged deep in our tissues and emerge to surprise us. For we forget our origins; in our towns and cities, staring into our screens, we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved, and the legacy cannot be done away with. So the lesson, kids, is to put down your screens and GET OUTDOORS!