Avoiding Excess in Human Life

Humans need to belief, eat, sleep, work, have a tranquil heart, and reproduce. These are the worldly necessities in their life, things that need to be fulfilled. Something that needs fulfillment has three states: deficiency, sufficiency, and excess. Sufficiency is a virtue. In fact, the closely-related word to it--balance, it is the exact property of a virtue. It is hard to think that a virtue can come out in a condition of excess, nor deficiency.^[1]

Since the industrialization happened in the 18th century, wider ranges of people in the world started to experience excess of resources in their life. People have a higher chance to have access to whatever that fulfills their needs with much more lower barrier, even though definitely to this day the distribution of resources to fulfill the human necessities is not perfect. The industry revolution, or I'd rather say, automation, has been providing us to do things to a greater degree.

This is not without repercussion. Arguably, what makes excess in humans makes deficiency in their environment, the earth. This is not a situation that we desire, as we are entrusted to take care this precious green-and-blue planet. Humans need to find a balance. The perfect state is sufficiency. We need to utilize all the leverages we have cultivated to seek balance, avoiding excess and deficiency.

Can we steer the direction of we're heading towards achieving a state of sufficiency in all aspects of life? We shall design automation, the theme of our century, in such a way that can bring us to this virtue of balance.