Why Gravity Rules is Important for Me

The gravity rules encourage us to think about and question everything. Gravity is a constant, its unchangeable and it forms a valuable contrast to the rules by which we live, which are constructed or engineered. As humans we come together and decide on how we are going to live. Throughout history and even in the globalised world today humans have created ways of organising ourselves into what we usually refer to as societies. These societies can have different values.

Many Western nations, including my own, the UK, are based around a set of values, which has evolved over many centuries. At the moment these values are centred around the idea of monogamous marriage, a family with two parents, preferably one male and one female, and the pursuit of money – lots of money, so we can buy a house, a car, the biggest TV we have ever seen, an iPad, an iPhone, a Macbook Pro, an xbox, a playstation, a top of the range racing bike, barefoot running shoes, quinoa, a gym membership, beauty treatment, cosmetic surgery…

I recently met a 20 year old girl at a christening. There were a number of pregnant women there so we started talking about whether we would like to be pregnant. On pregnancy the 20 year old said, “I’m going to wait til I’m rich enough to have children, so I can afford designer maternity clothes, so I won’t look ridiculous. And then I’ll need a personal trainer once I’ve had the baby. And then, of course, there’s the surgery”. The girl had summed up for me everything that is wrong with everything. How did this extreme version of reality become so normalised?

There was a study recently that showed that materialism makes us unhappy. Our entire economy is about more, selling more, making more, never ending growth. There is no end goal. It’s not materialism that makes us unhappy, it’s the result of what it represents. A never ending pursuit of happiness based on material goods. But the system is fixed against us, we’re never meant to be happy, because then we couldn’t be sold anymore things. And this is dangerous because it plays into even our perception of our own bodies – just like the 20 year old girl. The designer maternity clothes, the personal trainer, the surgery – they are all essentials, a part of life, just like having a child. Without these things we can never be happy.

So for me Gravity Rules is about questioning everything. Is monogamous marriage really the best way of living for everyone? It is for me, I’m very comfortable with it. Do all children need a mum and a dad? I hope not, because my future wife and I are planning on having a child. There is no evidence to suggest that the ‘traditional’ (I mean, in modern Western culture) family is the best way. There are no hard and fast rules to how we should live our lives. The trigger for realising and really knowing that everything we think we know is socially engineered is specific and personal to everyone. For me it was obvious, I am attracted to people of the same sex. For other people it will be something different, but just start by asking yourself, why I am doing this? Or, why am I thinking this? Or, is this actually important?