Where do the impulses that guide our decisions to do something extraordinary come from? How do motivation and drive find and guide us for the “doing of a thing?”

I’d venture to say that there are two common ways of leading one’s life: resignation or bitterness. And then there’s the rarer third way: meeting it with exuberance and delight.

In a sense, I’m describing the conscious and subconscious minds that lead us to the Pollyanna principle. This principle states that at the subconscious level, we tend to focus on the optimistic, while on the conscious level, we have a tendency to focus on the negative.

Most people I’ve met are certainly caught up in their conscious minds, while a small group, a very small group, has figured out a way of bringing their subconscious minds forward, allowing themselves to revel in the amazing. Nobody who is mired in frustration chooses to be unhappy, though. Unless they truly enjoy a traumatic struggle to find happiness.

In America, we tend to focus more on the external qualities of life than the internal. Hence, our lives, to a large extent, are a manifestation of the lifestyle we are able to put on display. We are a composite of our belongings, clothes, brands, pop culture, and devices.

What we are not is the sum of our intellectual longings or imaginative observations. We are effectively forced to kill that playful part of us while still in our teens as society asks us to be serious and accept the pain of existence.

Yet, we are the ones who make existence difficult. We allow the perpetuation of turning play into toil; we do it by telling the young person they must turn away from fun and games and start to reconcile that they will now focus on work. Homework, classwork, yard work, chores – these are a kind of punishment, a penance for existing. It is behavioral conditioning that follows us through our lives. Think about it: how we describe “Rolling up our sleeves and facing the hard work ahead” as though we may not return or at least we may suffer for our efforts.

Learning, playing, creating, and experiencing that offer delight should be our daily reward for breathing. The archaic conditioning of outmoded industrial structural dominance that has governed us needs to be cast off. We must start to bring the subconscious mind forward and return to play.

The constant complaining, maligning, verbal, and visceral recognition of what is wrong with the world does nothing but enforce the bitterness within ourselves and those around us. The silent resignation and acceptance of a bad situation is not a solution either. By either accepting the status quo or constantly complaining about everything, we are the ones who are filling our sandbox with cat turds of our own making.

We have to re-employ our intellect and see that we intuitively know the social, environmental, societal, and geopolitical problems that exist and then do something about them. We are a species of thinkers. We use words and other symbols to alter our world and build new visions. The writing is on the wall right in front of us; we must be willing to do the thing, to do something, something positive.

And so it is that one person shares a vision of doing something while having more than a dozen people contribute by lending their creative talents to the endeavor. I also offer my gratitude to those who have offered their money to help realize the dream of someone who is trying to help us take one more small positive step forward.

Scientists have recently verified a genetic mutation first identified in 2006 from a random sampling of newborns as a significant enough anomaly to warrant claiming a new species of humanity has emerged. Walking among us today may be a species of humans that could be our replacements.

These findings have been kept secret for nearly a decade due to the fear that the release of such information could cause widespread hysteria. The discovery has been held from public knowledge as authorities and the scientific community sought to understand the larger implications for society.

For many, the first question would be, “If humans were showing signs of evolutionary change, would anyone be able to shield it from the public eye?”

The simple answer is there isn’t any physical mutation or visual differentiation that would allow us to easily spot the carriers of the new mutation in the way we would be able to distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals. There are NO outward differences that enable us to identify this new species of man and woman.

After years of research, the mutation appears to have started following the early years of the second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1900), but possibly not until the 1940s did the process gain momentum. For millennia, our species IQ has been slowly growing with some estimates suggesting it took close to 100,000 years for our intelligence to move from an apelike IQ of about 50 to something around 70 by 1900. Today, the average IQ of an American is about 100. In one percent of the time, humanity’s average intelligence went up 150%. Most of this gain has been post-World War II, along with our incredible gains in technology.

Following the Enlightenment of the 18th century, we humans entered a period of great intellectual advancement in medicine, chemistry, physics, communication, art, work, and ideas of freedom. The ensuing two hundred years were tumultuous and filled with war due to the social and structural norms that were being broken down due to humanity’s encounter with greater intellectual capacity. Stark and dramatic changes due to innovation were convulsing society.

It is now theorized that the forces that have propelled the evolutionary changes that had us diverging from a common ape ancestor and evolving from ancestral species such as Homo Erectus and Heidelbergensis along with failed side branches such as Neanderthalensis, Denisovans, and Floresiensis are still at work and producing a new version of us Hominins.

One possible explanation of how the mutation occurred is that it could have originated from some not-yet-understood communicative relationship between our brains and DNA. It is as though our species’ genetic code was somehow able to foresee and anticipate the social implications of our intellectual advancements and, in some way, understand where humanity would take knowledge. The idea that our DNA or some other biological mechanism can then direct gene expression and alter our very humanity to favor certain characteristics is certainly in the realm of what we thought until now was science fiction.

When we humans moved away from our hunter-gatherer roots and entered an agrarian age, we started to rapidly develop technology, allowing us to alter the lives of plants and head down a path of animal husbandry to domesticate particular animals. While this knowledge served us well for 10,000 years, it was with the approach of the modern era that we would see the greatest acceleration of change.

Nearly right up to modern times, people who lived on the margins of Earth in primitive cultures were seen as contemptible and just as often worthless. As such, they were taken into slavery and or pushed off their ancestral lands in order to make way for progress. For many years, our ancestors didn’t believe that these “barbarians and primitives” were even related to the modern enlightened figure who was thrusting culture and economy forward.

Fast forward to today, and we see the exchange of information and economy on a global scale with no end in sight. People have been culturally and racially integrating while accepting the rapidly changing social views that are coming with the dawn of distributed knowledge. And it is this word, knowledge, that is the underpinning of our current evolutionary trajectory.

Knowledge was and is the only tool our species can possess that might allow life to move into the Universe. If we were to remain warlike, full of hatred and intolerance, we could theoretically extinct ourselves before intelligent life had the opportunity to move forward with its ultimate instinctual goal – the propagation of life.

Many on Earth now recognize the vestiges of this ancestral predecessor and are trying to repair their violent mistakes with steps to alleviate the damage inflicted upon our environment and other species. This change of attitude and action is likely originating in this new species of humans.

This information is starting to leak out now because the mutation is widespread enough that no attempt to destroy it will be effective. In all corners of the Earth, we are seeing the appearance of this new form of man and woman. We might recognize them as they embrace complexity and strive for social cohesion.

Their immediate ancestors were the scientists, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, and politicians who paved the way for everything from rocketry, MRI, smartphones, the Internet, and, yes, Virtual Reality. The possible first generation of these new people has already retired, with the second generation in their working prime soon, though the largest wave of new humans will wrest control from the dominant but self-extincting earlier species of man and begin to take the helm of guiding humanity.

Some might worry that as the older version of humanity recognizes they are being pushed aside, they will rebel and attempt to kill off the new type of human being. However, this kind of backlash may not be feasible, as the new version cannot be distinguished from the old.

Our forebears had to look identical as in all likelihood, the current dominant species would have attempted to extinct it if it could identify it, especially if it posed a threat to people and their way of life.

Nature appears to be putting to rest the part of the hominin species that brought us the Stone Age and fought our battles. The next version of humans might be called Homo Intelligens, and their coming era and beyond could be one of social, almost hive-like cooperation that could propel thought and culture deep into the Universe as we find our way off of our planet and into the cosmos.

If you would like to know who they are, you can find them scattered around our Earth. Often, the genetic mutation has been triggered in the children of average people, and no one can yet see just how different they will grow up to be. There are hundreds of millions of them. They will be known for their ease of moving into complexity. They are hugely social and accepting of cultural differences while being wary of people stuck in outdated modes of thought and intolerance. In the 1970’s we likely got our first real glimpse of them as a growing population when they became computer programmers and engineers and ushered in the age of communication.

Without them now humanity would possibly cease to exist as there are simply too many people on Earth that must be fed, clothed, housed, their waste eliminated, their cities maintained, electricity distribution, and communication systems kept humming.

Humanity is at a crossroads where it must choose to embrace the coming radical social upheaval that will accompany our shift from one human species to another. One that doesn’t share the same cultural norms, religion, and antiquated forms of behavior of the group it is leaving behind. Or the aggression still inherent in our dominant species, who inherited their warlike violent tendencies from long-separated ape ancestors, will drive them to declare war on humanity and cause our demise.

“They will be known by the masks they wear on their faces, and you will find them in Virtual Reality. Their secret society will be invisible unless you know just where to look. They are shaping our future; they will be walking among us in Hypatia.”

Why are people bored? To my mind, boredom seems nearly impossible. I say nearly because I, too, know what it is. Wikipedia says boredom has to do with our “Experience of time and problems of meaning.” I get this. We find ourselves uncertain about what to do next, especially if what we are considering has no real personal meaning. Hence, kids can become bored playing video games because the game has lost meaning, but there’s nothing else to do with one’s time.

The philosophical definition of boredom talks about one’s environment being dull, tedious, and lacking stimulation. In our technologically advanced age, this seems like an impossibility, but I get it, too. You see, having a laundry list of virtually thousands of things to do is a pretty recent thing. We no longer look for what we will be doing for the rest of the day. A typical 16-hour day has been fragmented into tiny moments that need filling. Imagine life on a farm 100 years ago; you might have worked a task an entire day and still have to return to it the next day.

Fast forward to 2015, and we are constantly waiting for the next stimulus, and when it arrives late, we get bored. So, we pull out our phones and make a quick scan of the social media we are plugged into. Nothing there? Try a quick game with someone else who’s bored. If they’re not responding quickly enough, play against the computer.

We are not becoming stimulus junkies; we have ALWAYS been, so it’s just getting easier to satisfy that biological need. We used to see it in nomads, inventors, professional soldiers, serial entrepreneurs, and artists. Now, it’s starting to afflict all of us. We need adventures, entertainment, and lots of stuff to do.

This is where a symbiosis between Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence can work positively for humanity. If our robot overlords could anticipate where boredom might arise and take steps to place us in situations that account for our trajectory into a void of stimulus and counter that with something to do that is of interest to us, boredom would be crushed.

Video games and action movies already try to do this by throwing brute force kinetic energy at the player/viewer in a relentless attack so the person cannot pause for even a second of boredom. The problem here is that some of us, I suspect many more than we might think, do not enjoy this bombardment of mindless intensity where thought is excluded in exchange for more excitement.

So, is there a place for an environment like Hypatia? I believe so. Will we see players get bored? Possibly, but it will hopefully be quickly squashed as the player continues their exploration and discovery of our city. As more creative people move in and start offering their content and entertainment to others, they will fill the gap where a small company simply cannot produce so much material to keep the visitor constantly engaged.

Hypatia demands participation. You are not only the observer in your seat waiting to be entertained, but you also have a responsibility to yourself and others to get involved. It’s kind of like a band; either you are on stage playing guitar with us, or the show was sold out, and you’re watching your favorite group again on YouTube. So saddle up your inner panther and get ready to pounce…..boredom will be banished.