We forgot
how to be human

I grew up close to the ground. The first sixteen years of my life were in Indonesia — bare feet, real food, days that moved with the sun instead of against it. I didn't have a word for it back then. It was just life. You didn't need a philosophy for something that was simply how things were.

Then I moved to the Netherlands, and I've lived here more than twenty years now. And somewhere in those twenty years I started to see, slowly and then very clearly, just how far from the ground western life actually is.

Here, more is more. Always. A bigger house, a newer phone, a fuller calendar, a longer list of things achieved — bachelor's degree, master's degree, the next promotion, the next title after your name. Nobody ever quite arrives — there's always a next thing waiting right behind the one you just got. I used to think that was just ambition. Now I think it's a hamster wheel with better lighting. The hamster isn't lazy or unmotivated — it's running as hard as it can. It's just running in a circle, in a cage, mistaking motion for progress. And the terrible part is the cage is comfortable enough that most people never notice it's a cage at all.

I don't think this is a coincidence, or a personality flaw in western culture. I think it's what happens when a whole society organizes itself around feeding the ego instead of the human underneath it.

How the roommate operates

The ego is the part of you that needs a role to exist. It cannot survive without an audience, without comparison, without something to defend or prove. Watch it for a day and you'll catch it everywhere — the split second before you speak in a group, checking how it'll land. A quiet morning turning into a private performance review: did I do enough, am I behind, does this person think less of me. It's rarely loud. It's a running commentary so constant we mistake it for our own thoughts, when really it's just one voice among several — the anxious one, the one that never stops keeping score.

The human underneath never asked for any of that. It just wants to feel the sun, eat something real, and be near people it loves — which, honestly, is exactly how I remember childhood in Indonesia. Nobody was chasing more. People had less, by western standards, and somehow that never seemed to be the problem people were solving for.

What it wants versus what we need

What the ego wants and what we need are almost never the same thing. The ego wants to be seen — the human just wants to be known. The ego wants more — the human is quietly, embarrassingly satisfied with very little. The ego needs the story to be about "me" — the human already knows it was never separate from anyone else to begin with. This is why the ego shrinks our circle. It doesn't have room for strangers, because strangers don't reflect anything back to it. So we retreat into our identity, our team, our side, and call it loyalty or realism, when really it's just the ego protecting its own reflection.

Even our senses get pulled into it. What our eyes are drawn to in a shop window, what our nose smells walking past a fast food place — that longing isn't the human speaking. It's a signal hijacked and pointed somewhere new. Coca-Cola isn't food. A screen isn't connection. A new object isn't peace, even for the ten minutes it feels like it might be. These are not natural things, and our bodies know it even when our minds have stopped listening.

Where it lives in the body

Because the ego isn't just a way of thinking, it's a way of holding yourself. Watch someone deep in ego and you'll see it before you hear it: the jaw set, the shoulders braced like they're expecting to have to defend something. Ego breathes high and shallow, up in the chest, ready to react. It rushes. It grips. Even rest isn't restful — you can be lying down and still be bracing.

The human is the opposite posture entirely. It breathes low, into the belly, the way you breathed as a child before anyone taught you to hold yourself a certain way — the way I breathed running around barefoot as a kid, before I ever knew what a hamster wheel was. This is exactly why yoga works on something that talking alone can't reach — you can't think your way out of a nervous system that's been braced for years. You have to physically unclench it, breath by breath, until the body remembers what safe actually feels like.

"You cannot ask a creature to live against its nature and expect it to thrive."

The cow forced to live like a fish

Try to imagine a cow forced to live like a fish. It's absurd — the cow would break down almost immediately. And yet that's exactly what urbanisation asks of us. I've lived both sides of it now — close to the ground for sixteen years, and inside the concrete and schedules of the west for twenty more — and I can tell you the cow does break down. Slowly, quietly, in ways that look like burnout or midlife crisis or just a low hum of never-quite-okay that people stop questioning because everyone around them has it too.

Yaya, and what money can't buy

I was reminded of all of this recently, on a night I wasn't expecting a reminder at all. I'd gone to West Africa to embrace this journey, and somewhere along the way I'd gotten quietly down about it — the kind of down you don't always announce, but the people around you can see anyway. My host, Yaya, at Sunshine Lodge in Kartong, saw it in me before I said a word.

We already had a yoga massage session booked for that evening. By the end of it I felt so much lighter — his hands, his stories, the whole evening — that I told him honestly how much better I felt. I went to pay him. He wouldn't take the money.

He said he didn't want it. He said his payment was my smile and my contentment coming back. He told me that while I was staying with him, he felt whatever I was feeling, and all he wanted was to help me in whatever way he could.

This is a man who charges around 17 euros a night for his little wooden house on the beach in Kartong. He has almost nothing, by the measure most of us in the west use to measure things. And he gave me something that no amount of money buys — not because he had extra to spare, but because in his world, my wellbeing wasn't separate from his own. That's not a business transaction dressed up as kindness. That's just what it looks like when someone hasn't forgotten they're human. That's what I mean by love in humanity.

I don't think I'll find that particular thing in a shop, in the Netherlands, or anywhere the wheel is still turning. I think you only find it where people are still close enough to the ground to remember that we need each other more than we need more.

What's on the other side

So what's actually left, once the wheel stops turning and the roommate quiets down? Less than you'd think, and more than enough. Not some new identity to replace the old one — that would just be the ego wearing a different costume. Just a kind of plainness, the one I remember from being a kid with sand between my toes, and the one Yaya reminded me of on that beach in Kartong: food tastes like food again, a conversation is just a conversation, a smile is actually enough payment for a very tired heart.

This is where yoga comes back in for me — not as exercise, but as a way back to that ground I grew up on, now that I live somewhere that makes it so easy to forget. On the mat, there's no wheel to run on. No role to perform. Just breath, body, earth. One of the last honest spaces left, where I get to ask: underneath everything I've picked up in twenty years of more-is-more, who am I, actually?

We can't undo urbanisation, and I'm not saying we all need to go live barefoot in a village to be well — I know that's not realistic for most people, myself included, most days. But we can notice the wheel we're on. We can choose, in small ways, to step off it — time outside, food that grew instead of was manufactured, stillness, each other. Not as a trend, but as a return to something I don't think was ever actually lost. Just buried under twenty years of being told more was the answer.

I think about Yaya often now. Not because what he did was extraordinary — he'd probably tell you it wasn't. But because it was so simple, and so rare to witness, that it shook something loose in me. We are not our roles. We are not our ego. We are human. And some of us just get lucky enough to be reminded of it, by someone with very little, who somehow has more than enough to give.