Wake up. Go to work. Go to sleep. Rinse & Repeat.This is about the best that most people can hope for, at least the way the system is now. We live to survive and survive to live. Is this what you want? Probably not. It is what we've got - but it doesn't have to be this way.
Think of the world as being a reflection of humanity - not nature and plants - but the system that we participate in daily that forms a part of our lives, collectively and individually. This system was and is being created by us ('us' as in humanity) - no one in their "right mind" (what, as opposed to wrong mind, or left mind?) would claim that this system was put here by some third party, it exists and functions simply because it was made by those who went before us and is perpetuated by us here and now.
You may wonder what it means that the system is a reflection of who we are as humanity. In everything we create or develop, we are expressing a part of ourselves, like imprinting who we are into a physical creation. In the products we create we reflect our desires, thoughts, projections, hopes, goals and even fears. Consider, for example, the toy industry - a toy will be designed, produced and sold based on a number of factors: what the designer thinks children will like, the goals of the producer/creators (eg. make a low cost toy that may not last but will potentially make lots of short term sales), the skills and resources available and so on and so forth. Within the process of making toys there must be employees (or robots - even this reflects the priorities of humanity) who will have particular working conditions that may or may not be inspected regularly by a regulatory body (the fact that we need regulatory bodies in different industries to ensure that working conditions and/or are safe is also an indicator of who we are as a society), then there will be the consumers (come on, we even call ourselves consumers) who will either buy or not buy the product (what we support with our money is what we value - or what we need to survive).
Consider how many scandals have made the rounds concerning big name brands that almost everyone in the world are familiar with. Something is uncovered and the guilty corporation will claim ignorance (guilty corporation = guilty and responsible human beings) of the atrocities and will "correct the issues" as well as initiate a re-branding campaign (a series of advertisements designed specifically to emotionally manipulate the consumers into buying the guilty corporation's products again) and after a few months the entire debacle is forgotten.
Even after the scandal, people continue to support (buy the products of) the guilty corporation. What does that tell you about who we are as a people? How about this: things like dangerous working conditions, slave labour, child labour, chemical spills, abuse, etc etc don't happen behind locked doors where there is only the victim and the perpetrator - there are always opportunities for other people to witness what happens. We are all witnessing some pretty horrific things, yet the best response we seem to be able to must up is *gasp*. We are all silently witnessing the destruction of the planet, the abuse and genocide of animals, the exploitation of the weak and the neglect of the powerless.
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