WHEN I see a ham and cheese sandwich, the first thought that comes to mind is, Remove the bread, lettuce, mayo, and cheese to reveal the essential ham. The other ingredients are merely decor.
That kind of thought is already automatic for the carnivore who has learned to eliminate non-essential ingredients from his diet. Carnivore, however, is not the ultimate elimination diet. Lion diet is — all you need are beef, water, and salt. It’s so simplified, no need to prepare a menu for the week. Have beef, water, and salt for each meal. This routine can be easily reduced to OMAD — one meal a day — since the dieter is always satiated with beef.
The principle behind the lion diet can also be applied to life if we’re now overwhelmed by unnecessary possessions. Food, clothing, and shelter are life’s basic needs. But we tend to complicate the food with all kinds of ingredients; clothing with all sorts of brands, styles, prints, materials, and colors; and shelter with so many locations, sizes, roofs, walls, floors, appliances, furniture and fixtures, and decor.
There was a time when food meant nourishing the body, clothing meant covering the body, and shelter meant protecting the body. That was the Jurassic Age when dinosaurs were perhaps included as man’s food source. But what happened between then and now made life more complicated. Running was then used to flee from the T. rex. Now, refugees are running away from war-torn and/or impoverished countries, to seek refuge in any First World country that will accept them.
Meanwhile, some First World citizens are adopting the minimalist lifestyle to escape from the life that refugees may be dreaming of. Proving that man is never satisfied. The refugee wants a better life; the citizen of the country he’s aiming for wants a simpler life.
The dissatisfaction results to a constant merry-go-round of people running away from what they believe is not a life and running to what they believe is a life.
It’s crystal clear that the citizens of the world create their own problems as if a gun is pointed at their heads to force them to create their own problems. Wait, kind of. Missiles, actually, not just guns. And not only that, they also create their own weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to make those problems way much bigger than what a gun could do.
People of a certain age must have thought that WMD threats won’t last long especially when popular singers like Michael Jackson began singing “We Are the World.” But that was for African famine relief, making its message unproductive against war.
Still, check out its lyrics: “There comes a time/When we heed a certain call/When the world must come together as one/There are people dying/Oh, and it’s time to lend a hand to life/The greatest gift of all.” See? It can be an anti-war theme song.
I guess the world needs a specific song for each turmoil, featuring current famous artists who, for now, are Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, SB19, BTS, BINI, Blackpink, Seventeen, and other artists of the same age. They can then perform Swift’s “The Great War”:
“All that bloodshed, crimson clover/Uh-huh, sweet dream was over/My hand was the one you reached for/All throughout the Great War.”
Like other Swift songs, this one is again about a relationship gone wrong. Which is exactly why there’s war.
