Life is a paradox
At one scale, life is a way of knowing itself.
Every act of curiosity, compassion, or creativity becomes part of the universe’s consciousness.
In this lens, to live is to contribute to collective wisdom, to strengthen the threads of connection across people, place, and cosmos.At another scale, life is self-perpetuating universal suicide.
Entropy unfolds, systems devour themselves, species collapse under their own weight.
Here, every act of greed, division, or short-term thinking hastens the cycle of destruction.Both are true. Both are real. And the tension between them is the space we live in.
So what do these paradoxes mean for our actions today?
At the micro scale, our choices either deepen knowing, through service, learning, manaakitanga – or accelerate unraveling, through selfishness, extraction, exploitation.
At the macro scale, our systems do the same.
An economy that serves equity and wellbeing expands knowing.
An economy that consumes people and planet accelerates suicide.
Digital inclusion opens pathways to wisdom.
Digital exclusion closes them.The paradox isn’t abstract. It plays out every day in our decisions as leaders, as communities, as a species still learning how to grow up.
In te ao Māori, whakapapa reminds us that life is never just self-contained.
It is continuity: threads of being carried across generations, always in relation.
When we act with manaakitanga and kotahitanga, we choose life as knowing itself.
When we sever whakapapa or ignore tikanga, we edge closer to life consuming itself.So perhaps the real question isn’t whether life is knowing or suicide.
It is: which future will we feed?Every action, every design, every policy choice leans us one way or the other.
Towards a future where humanity matures into wisdom.
Or towards a future where we unravel under the weight of our own cleverness.The paradox won’t resolve itself.
We resolve it, every day, in the choices we make.