by Charly Mann

More than nine billion animals are raised and slaughtered for food every year in the United States. Most of these animals are kept in factory farms where livestock is confined to a very small area during its entire lifetime. These animals are fed large amounts of food to fatten them up as quickly as possible.

Factory farming is not concerned with how the animals are treated. Its function is to produce meat for human consumption as quickly and cheaply as possible. Unfortunately, Americans’ increased consumption of meat is a contributing factor to our dramatic increase in obesity and heart disease.

Billions of pounds of waste from slaughtered animals are fed to other animals on these farms, including cattle blood fed to calves. Waste generated by slaughtered cows is fed to pigs and chickens, and waste from dead chickens and pigs is fed to cattle. 

Factory farming is also causing dangerous bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. Animals in factory farms live in very confined spaces, in or close to their own manure and urine. This unsanitary condition makes them highly prone to illness, so antibiotics are placed in their feed to boost their immune systems. The routine administration of antibiotics to factory farmed animals increases bacterial resistance to the antibiotics that humans use to fight off illnesses.

Whether you eat meat or not, everyone should want animals to live in sanitary and somewhat comfortable conditions. Placing animals in spaces so small that they cannot turn around, often never see light, and live in their own waste is cruel. Most male calves are castrated at three months and sent to feedlots, while female calves are taken away from their mothers just days after they are born and fed on artificial milk as they prepare to become diary cows. Dairy cows usually also have a very painful procedure called docking in which their tails are cut off to make it easier for workers to get close to their udders for milking. Dairy cows are eventually slaughtered when their milk production declines at five years of age, while male cows are quickly fattened and ready for slaughter in only one or two years. The natural lifespan of a cow is twenty-five years.  Pigs are very social, affectionate and intelligent creatures that are confined in narrow cages where they cannot even turn around. A mother pig is usually unable to move during most of her life, lying in her feces while her piglets barely have room to move. As a pig grows, it is placed in a concrete pen without any form of bedding and without soil to root in, which is natural for a pig. Pigs become aggressive and restless in such confinement and often attack one another. Many pigs develop pneumonia from the high level of ammonia produced by the waste they live in. Chickens in factory farms spend their entire life in a space of less than eight by ten inches.

Chickens naturally forage for food by pecking with their beaks. Since they are unable to peck in their small cages, their beaks are seared off. Chickens raised for meat are genetically altered to have thighs and breasts so large that they have difficulty standing. Chicken hens raised to produce eggs are kept in cramped cages with five to eight other hens in a space of just 14 square inches. Male chicks born in egg factories are suffocated in trash bags. When hens stop producing eggs they are slaughtered for meat.

Being human means being humane. This requires us to be compassionate to animals. There will be a much brighter future for all living beings if man can learn to respect and be kind to animals. Empathy for animals helps build moral character, reduces our tendency for violence, and creates a world where people are more caring toward each other.

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by Charly Mann

Looking around at the people I know who have had rich and meaningful lives, it is obvious that the quality of their friends is what matters most to them. It is true, as Wendell Berry said, "by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity." Friends who motivate and inspire us help us rise to our potential. They set high standards in their own lives and challenge us to do the same. They make us achieve things that otherwise we would think impossible.

The problem in life is that we rarely choose our friends wisely.  Most of us befriend people who are the easiest to get along with. These are usually people who provide little inspiration and who criticize us the least. Instead of raising our standards of behavior, achievement, and knowledge they lower them, and we become less ethical, less responsible, and do more stupid things. We are usually drawn to these people because they make us feel good about ourselves, but all they are really doing is lifting our spirits by accepting our faults and weaknesses. People often feel better about themselves when they associate with people who have more faults and are less intelligent than them.

The best is advice is to never fall for a friend, but always rise to one. Friendships that provide the most positive influence in your life can also be the most complicated and and difficult to maintain. This kind of friend expects the most of you. When they fail to meet the high standards they set for you and themselves, it is easy to be more critical of them than we are of people with low standards and expectations of us.

I have two very close friends who are both highly intelligent. One came from a dysfuntional background with only an irrsesponsible single mother, and lived at or near poverty throughout her childhood. The other had a normal upper-class childhood with two responsible, intelligent parents. Both did exceptionally well in college and got jobs at major corporations. My friend with the dysfuctional background surrounded herself with the brightest, most accomplished, and hard working friends she could find in her professional and social life. She rose swiftly through the company's ranks into mangement and each year her company has awarded her with an exceptional performance rating. My other friend chose companions who were at, or near, the bottom in ability and performance, and during almost a quarter century at her company never achieved a single exceptional rating. Finally as her job performance and quality of friends continued to decline she was let go from her job.

In today's world of social networking the more friends one has usually correlates to how shallow one's relationships are. A real friend requires intimacy and quality time. People who we twitter, e-mail, or "party" with are usually not sharing significant growth experiences with us, and are unlikely to know us very well. A couple of years ago I asked someone I knew who had a sizeable network of social and Internet friends to define who she was. Even though she was in her mid-fifties, college educated, and had had a long corporate career, she replied that she was stumped and did not know.

A good friend should enrich your life. They should possess attributes you admire, and offer you valuable learning experiences that help you understand yourself better. Friends who expand who we are, rather than acting as a mirror, are wonderful companions in life, and are the key to happiness in this world.

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by Charly Mann

The more I examine the dialogue going on around me, the more I am convinced that many people really believe life sucks. It is not uncommon to hear from a number of teenagers and young adults that, “life is a shit sandwich, and every day is another bite.” Even more typical are statements like the following that fill discussions on popular Internet sites:

Life seems to suck nowadays. I don’t feel like doing anything. All I wanna do is sleep on the couch and eat fast food and hope not to get fat. I feel like a loser. I have little social life and my exams are bad, having almost flunked english, the subject which I topped in primary school.

The following from another individual, however, might be the quintessential expression of this philosophy:

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your husband leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills, but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back, and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Our major religions don’t necessarily contradict this idea either. The first noble truth of Buddhism is that the nature of life is to experience suffering. The best that Buddhism says we can hope for is temporary happiness and pleasure that will eventually be replaced by pain, fear, and mental distress. Unfortunately, in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, even death is not an escape from our unhappiness. Buddhists and Hindus say we are simply reborn into different bodies, and that we will suffer the same problems we had in this lifetime. Christians, on the other hand, believe you have probably a 9 in 10 chance of going to hell after you die, where you will suffer even more than you did in this lifetime, and do so for eternity. Here is what a Christian theologian said recently:

Surely, nine out of ten people in this wicked world are bound for a Godless, eternal hell.  I have no doubts whatsoever that 90% of the people in this world are going to Hell.  Why?  For one simple reason friend, they do not have the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior—Their sins have not been forgiven.  We estimated that 232,876 humans die every day on average. 232,876 minus 10% equals 209,588 people that perish into hell fire and destruction every single day that passes.   So roughly, 200,000 HUMANS PLUNGE INTO HELL FIRE EACH AND EVERY DAY!   We also see that 23,287 people (10%) make it to Heaven each day on average.   

So, does life really suck? No, far from it, life is truly a great and exciting journey with some bumps on the road. The primary reason for this is one word – love. Real love may be difficult to find, but when you share it with even one wonderful person, it is the greatest gift life can bestow. The love I am talking about is real love, and is often called unconditional love. It can only be experienced between people who share so much in common that even sitting silently with them is as enjoyable as a great conversation.

Life is also great if you can surround yourself with wonderful people. These are people who are generous, mature, humble, and possess a strong degree of personal integrity. Most importantly, they have a passion and commitment for making their life and the lives of others better.

Life is also great if you have a purpose that keeps you focused and committed to always doing your best.

Finally, what makes life great is how far we as humans have come in just the last ten thousand years. With our ingenuity and creativity, we have progressed from being nomadic people who were hungry most of the time and rarely lived beyond the age of twenty to living in comfortable homes, having more food than we need, and usually being healthy until at least the age of eighty.

For those who believe life sucks, I suggest you try making something of your life. Do something good and helpful for others. Try looking at things positively instead of negatively. There is joy in the simple things in life. Enjoy a smile you put on someone else’s face, savor the beauty of nature, enjoy human creativity at its finest by listening to great music or visiting an art museum. Appreciate the amazing beauty of a flower in bloom.

We are not perfect people and this is not a perfect world. It is inevitable that we will endure sorrows, sickness, and death, yet during most of life we can experience comfort and happiness. The primary reason we are unhappy with our lives is because of our attachment to physical things, including money, possessions, our own body, and other people. Most enlightened religions and philosophies explain that as long as we are attached to the false belief that we are our bodies, we will never be able to escape unhappiness.  As soon as we cease our attachment to things and our physical form, all our worries and troubles will go away. This is a long and gradual path for each of us, but it can be attained.  

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by Charly Mann

Most people believe that we will live for eternity after this lifetime.
So think about just a blip of the eternal clock.

On Wednesday March 19, 2008 one could look up into the night sky and see with the naked eye a strange burst of light for about an hour. What one was actually witnessing was the explosion of a star forty times larger than our own sun that was 7.5 billion light years away from us. That means this event occurred 7.5 billion years ago, and the light from it was finally reaching the earth.

Now think about this.  Light travels 5.9 trillion miles in one light year. Multiply this by 7.5 billion and you get the distance in miles to where this star once existed, and it was located only at about the halfway point to the edge of our universe. Our space shuttle is very fast, traveling at about 5 miles a second or 18,000 miles an hour. But this is slow compared to the speed of light which is 37,200 times faster than the shuttle. So if we got in a vehicle as fast as the shuttle it would take us 37,200 years just to go one light-year. It would take us 279 trillion years at that speed to finally reach the location of this former star.

Now put that time in another perspective. The world population in March 2008 is estimated to be 6.7 billion people. In the time it would take you to travel halfway across the universe at 18,000 miles an hour you could spend 41,641 years with each person currently living on the planet. 

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by Charly Mann

There was a time when artistic triumph, quality of goods, and creative innovation was celebrated. Today we live in a world of complacency where people only seek to be comfortable in their lives. Our culture no longer desires great art, literature, or music. We have become duped into believing that all of our technological progress makes us smarter and more sophisticated. In reality we have accepted the notion of fitting in and being normal. Today our most popular cultural figures are celebrities that demonstrate neither originality nor exceptional intelligence. Idolizing such individuals robs us of the chance to be extraordinary. Striving for excellence is the best way to combat mediocrity. We see and hear the ordinary everywhere. Truly profound ideas, talents, and insights are only achieved by those who study the exemplary.

While the majority of people in every generation have been attracted to a mass-market mediocrity, there has always in the past been a respected elite that strove for excellence in every phase of life. It is from these people that our great leaders, business innovators, and cultural icons emerged. The responsibility of schools and universities was once to ensure that students be given the opportunity to achieve their full intellectual potential. Today our schools are more concerned with achievements on the sporting field than academic.

Each of us should be determined and focused on reaching our human potential. To achieve excellence requires living life with a clear purpose and intensity. The ingredients for great achievement are curiosity, discipline, and an irreverence in thought that will spark new ideas. You also have to be committed to excellence in everything you are trying to achieve. Studies have shown that people who can allow themselves to be sloppy even 5% of the time rarely achieve any form of greatness. Excellence truly means striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

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The unique personality which is the real you, you will not gain unless you search for the spiritual quality in others. It is only from the God inside others, that the God hidden in you will consent to appear.

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