Embrace Uncertainty in Your Own Life Through This Seldom Told Story of Pandora’s Box
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Somewhere near Mt. Olympus.
Prometheus observes people starved, cold, and living in caves. They seem miserable and he wants to do something about it. He lobbies Zeus to let them have fire. Request denied.
Prometheus isn’t one for following orders, so he lights a stock of fennel on fire, brings it down to us humans and shows us its power and its many uses. People learn to generate heat, forge tools, cook food, build shelters, and all sorts of nifty things. Zeus finds out what happens and devises a plan of his own.
Enter Pandora.
Zeus has Pandora created and all the gods gift her different qualities. Such as beauty, kindness, artistry, and curiosity. Lastly, she is given a box and Athena tells her never to open it.
Pandora is then married off to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother. Eventually, her curiosity gets the best of her, she just slightly cracks the box open and from it tens of thousands of deathly figures emerged and spread through the lands. Death, disease, and hardships never before known are now commonplace.
But there is one more thing in the box, hope.
For all the misery delivered to humanity, hope was also given to us.
We see this story play out in our psyche’s everytime a vast technology enters our lives: Nuclear power, AI, and recently, genetic editing.
Once the technology is discovered, we can’t put it back in the box. But we can choose to have hope. Hope that we use this technology to heal our environments, eliminate diseases, build more equitable societies, and all the great things made possible by vast new innovations.
