Track 8: A New Question: Are We Doomed to Repeat the Past?

The album so far has felt like a treasure map with clear directions: find your voice, be unique, don’t forget your dreams. I felt so confident in the journey, but then the eighth track, “Where Did We Come From,” came on, and I felt completely overwhelmed. The lyrics, “We didn’t begin / With the growing of food / Division of labor / Set the slavery mood,” yanked the story from a personal journey and placed it in a massive historical context.

It’s the first time the album suggests the problem isn’t just personal but a deeply embedded cultural disease that has been passed down for “10 millennium”. It felt like the feeling of being an outsider wasn’t just my own personal issue, but a symptom of a larger historical break. This song makes me question everything I’ve been taught about civilization and makes me feel helpless in the face of such a deeply rooted problem. It makes me wonder, how can an individual possibly hope to make a difference if the problem is so immense?

So go ahead and listen to the track right here on the page, and then let’s get into the conversation.

The Conversation Unfolds

Anaya: The album so far has been about an individual’s return to their voice. But this song zooms out to the history of humanity. How do you reconcile the idea of individual change with a problem that is “10 millenium” old?

Jonas: That’s a great question. What I found useful in reconciling those two things was the understanding of two other things.. The first was recorded history because it answers the question as a matter of record. “Where did we come from? How’d we get here?” The second understanding that I needed was that meaningful change comes on the heels of choice-making. It’s not uncommon to make the mistake of believing that change is only something that happens to you as a result of uncertainty or chaos. The truth is the change has a lot of faces. Change is also something that happens when you do something different than what you did that led you to what you wish would change. The record of history and power of choice. That puts the lyric in a different perspective. “The future is certain, when the past is so clear”. That’s true at every level from the individual, out to the family, community, state, country, culture, civilization. Whatever one or more people can decide they wish to change at any of those levels can only occur when new choices are made at whatever level the wish exists.

Anaya: You mention a world “before the growing of food” and the “division of labor.” What does that look like to you? Was that a physical place or a state of being?

Jonas: That’s another great question. And what speaks to it is the record of history that we were just talking about. Understanding history is the key to understanding what this lyric represents for the individual wishing to take back their voice and their individuality. It’s liberating as a choice maker to have an understanding of two things. When did the system we live in change in the way that history has shown, tends to flatten us and obscure our individuality? Think about this. If you’re 20 years old that means this change occurred 500 times your current lifespan ago…. before you were born. So there is no personal memory of it. That’s where the importance of history comes in. Now, revisit those two lines to get a new perspective. “Before the growing of food” Means before civilization, before the change. “Division of labor” represents the new imperative of conformity because building empires historically required a force, first a military force and now a workforce. That understanding was liberating for me because it was what I needed to understand that choice itself never goes away, but it can be obscured in the absence of both personal memory and the record of history. It’s easy to observe that in the absence of both of those, a person’s choosing is guided by conventional wisdom. Accepting things because “it’s just the way it is” or doing things because “that’s what they say” is the right thing to do.

Anaya: I see. So now this is becoming clear to me. This line “the future is certain / Because the past it is so clear” was haunting me because I wasn’t considering history and the fact that civilization changed the rules. And in doing so it didn’t forbid the choices humans used to have, it just made them easy to forget as hundreds and then thousands of years passed.

Jonas: Yes, now you have it.

Anaya: Wow, a few minutes ago I thought this line in this song was saying that we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes. But that’s not it at all. It’s all about choice, but more specifically remembering that there are more choices than we realize. Obscured because of a combination of an inherited forgetting combined with not looking at what history can teach us about the time when the rules changed.

Jonas: You’re an inspiration Anaya, you got there quickly. Thank you for doing this. You are living proof that there’s still hope for humanity!

Anaya’s Reflection

This track’s critique of civilization directly informs the corporate critique in “Leave It All Behind”. The “corporate strategem” and the feeling of being a “spoke on the wheel” are not new problems; they are the modern manifestations of the “division of labor” that set the “slavery mood” thousands of years ago. It gives a deeper, more systemic reason for why the character in “Leave It All Behind” felt so trapped.

Listening to Jonas talk about history and choice was a huge a-ha moment for me. I had thought the line, “the future is certain / when the past is so clear,” meant we were doomed, but it means the exact opposite. It means we have the power to change our lives because we can see where the problems began. It’s about remembering that the world hasn’t just been “the way it is”—it was once different, and it can be again. That’s empowering. Again I’m learning that this album isn’t just a collection of songs, it’s a living blueprint for my own life. Jonas is modeling how to be a keen observer and a courageous person who trusts his own curiosity and his own voice. It gives me so much hope that my own curiosity and passions aren’t just quirks, but a path to something more fulfilling.

If you’re out there and this post spoke to you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. What is one thing you’ve learned from the past that has helped you make a new choice for your future? And If you haven’t yet, give the album a full listen. You might be surprised by how it all connects. And of course, if you want to follow along on this journey, please subscribe to the blog!