Addiction: healing individuals, society and our environment.

Madeira Portugal. Nature knows how to take care of itself.

Just a quick note:

My main takeaway from Hari's talk on addiction was that we need to pay attention to society and our environment (the "cage") and not just how to heal the individual. 

Heroin addiction - before and after. What causes people to become addicted to drugs?

Challenges we are facing today can not be substantially and sustainably improved if we don't look at the bigger picture, the way things in our ecosystem are connected, the symbiotic relationships in nature, and the inter-dependencies of living systems. 

Taking things apart and re-engineering them is only one narrow way to improve our world. Complex living ecosystems require a much more profound understanding of how things work within a much larger system and require a much more nuanced treatment if we want to have better outcomes.  

Many things must change in the way we manage our affairs if we are going to be able to continue to evolve. If we're honest with ourselves we need to start acting on these insights. We don't have forever to make things better, we have but one lifetime.