I’ve often asked myself whether we actually belong here. Look at us, our backs ache as though gravity itself is too much. Our skin burns in the sun. And our children, my own two included, arrive in this world utterly fragile, helpless for years before they can even stand. Dolphins swim within minutes. Gazelles run for hours. Us? We stumble and break for decades before we even begin to understand what living means.
So sometimes I can’t help but think: maybe, just maybe, we are the aliens here.
But then biology drags me back. Our DNA is almost identical to that of chimpanzees. We share the same code of life as trees, fish, and even bacteria. In that sense, we are very much Earth’s children.
Yet still the feeling lingers. Because what makes us “alien” is not our bodies, it’s our consciousness.
Consciousness: The Alien Within
We are the animal that questions itself.
We don’t just eat; we ask what hunger means.
We don’t just die; we invent rituals to ask what comes next.
That awareness is a gift, yes, but also a curse. It makes us restless. It makes us feel at home everywhere, and yet at the same time, nowhere.
And this is where we are most vulnerable. Because our greatest battlefield is no longer physical, it’s mental.
Ideas That Kill (Literally)
I saw this during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Ebola itself was deadly, but what made it truly uncontrollable was not the virus; it was belief. A rumor could kill faster than the disease. A whisper that doctors were lying, or that a miracle cure existed, could undo months of work.
The virus was biological. The epidemic was ideological.
Fast forward a few years, and the world saw the same thing with COVID. The virus spread across continents, but what really divided us were the ideas that travelled alongside it. A mask or a vaccine stopped being medical; it became political. Social media turned science into identity. Once again, the deeper crisis was trust, and the way we confuse noise for truth.
The Battle for Mindset
That’s when it hit me: for the first time in human history, the real prize is not land, or oil, or even markets. It’s the mindset.
Whoever controls your attention controls your reality. Whoever tells the story wins.
And yet at the very moment when we need depth, we are drowning in shallows. Social media feeds us identity like chewing gum, sweet, disposable, tasteless. Outrage trends. Wisdom does not. Certainty is rewarded. Curiosity is punished.
We scroll through a thousand identities in a day, but rarely stop to ask the only question that actually matters: Who are we?
Weaponized Identity
I’ve seen it in every corner of the globe. Religion, ethnicity, gender, and nationality matter. They give us context. They shape our stories. But they are not the whole story.
They are costumes, not the actor.
They are chapters, not the book.
And yet today, they are weaponised. Sharpened into divisions. Sold back to us as tribes. And the more we shrink ourselves into these little boxes, the more we forget that we are something far greater.
Because the truth is this: we are fleeting arrangements of stardust, suspended in a universe that is itself still expanding in space and maybe even in consciousness. Every laugh, every prayer, every wave that breaks on the shore is a reflection of that same vastness, echoing back at us.
The Piercing Questions
And so, I keep returning to two questions that follow me everywhere across airports, across boardrooms, across nights watching my children sleep, and more so after both my parents continued their cosmic voyage.
Where were we before we were here?
Where will we be after we are gone?
I don’t think we’re meant to answer them. But I do think we’re meant to face them. Because those are the questions that cut through the noise, they strip away the costumes. They remind us that our humanity is not about the passport we hold, the flag we salute, or the box we tick. It’s about whether we dare to live in the mystery of being alive.
Who Are We, Really?
We are Earth’s children, yes. But we are also the cosmos waking up to itself. My children remind me of this every day; they are not just inheritors of my surname, or a culture, or a nation. They are inheritors of the stars.
We are stardust that learned how to speak.
And in a world where attention is the new currency and mindset the battlefield, the most radical thing we can do is not to shout louder, but to think deeper.
Because if we lose that, if we give in to distraction, if we let algorithms and headlines decide who we are, then mark my words: we will not just lose our depth, we will lose our freedom. And what comes next will look like democracy, but feel like dictatorship, the kind disguised as freedom itself.
And that, I fear, is the real danger. Not that we are aliens here, but that we forget who we are altogether.
Let us know your thoughts. If you have burning thoughts or opinions to express, please feel free to reach out to us at larra@globalindiannetwork.com.
