We've never had it
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Our brains are physiologically wired for the short term. In the place we came from, there was no long term. The world before society was brutal. We are still running on that hardware.
This is the correct answer. Whatever long term thinking we are capable of is a result of the most recently evolved parts of our brain.
Pop quiz for you: what’s twice as far away as a million years in the future?
Two million years in the future?
Human equilibrium with our environment
Our brains are physiologically wired for a longer term than any other brain in existence.
Human minds are the only thing we know of that has any awareness of the future. So on the scale of short term to long term, humans are the longest-term thinkers there are.
Ah, I missed the Im14andThisIsDeep subreddit. Thanks OP
Some people do look ahead. Those people are diagnosed with mental health issues like general anxiety disorder.
We did prepare, and other than some people who just contrarians who refuse to care about anyone else the general population did follow directions for the most part and we were able to avoid our health care systems completely collapsing.
If you didn't know, there have always been members of society that actively work against any kind of communal inconvenience that is for the greater good. During the (misnamed) Spanish Flu epidemic there were anti-maskers and people who intentionally undermined any public heath initiatives.
Should have*
Should have* realized*
Ok and when in your opinion has it been different? Some things just aren't so easily predictable and other things are predictable but people do not care because it mainly effects future generations and not them.
Always has been like that, always will be
I think what we lack is the understanding that just knowing the right thing to do doesn't make it happen, individually or collectively. Because if you look at any of the issues we face you can find people talking about it a hundred, three hundred, a thousand years ago, but it's like the solutions only get traction under some special lightning in a bottle circumstances. So you have to keep up the consciousness and the effort and especially creative inspiring things, and know that the failures are to be expected and the successes are so rare they need to be celebrated even when they are imperfect.
Well said. What people fail to understand is that simply telling people how they should act is futile. You need to alter the conditions that cause people to develop dysfunctional social behaviors in the first place.
We never had it, if we did the Romen Empire would be around and WW2 wouldn't exist
Wee bit more complex than that usually.
*should have
People are good at having all the information in the world available and still making retroactively obvious mistakes
I wonder if it’s connected to poor grammar? Is there any way that poor grammar could limit our ability to think long term?
I think it's a correlation=/= causation thing
You mean not dismantle the NSC stations set up in Wuhan specifically made to avoid plagues such as COVID?
Dude we only survive because we don't look ahead. Imagine how bleak things would be if we couldn't forget about the inevitable heat death of the universe, the sun expanding, and the thousand other inevitable world enders between here then then.
Now to drink so I can forget. 😅
That is 100,000,000,000 years from now. I'm talking about the next 100 years.
I didn't explain well I feel.
Too much prescience causes anxiety which people shy away from. It takes maturity and courage to look at the future, particularly if it's an inconvenient one. And yes, climate change is perfect example.
I think you are letting propaganda freak you out. Climate change isn't going to kill us all tomorrow. Even if it becomes some how majority disastrous it is unlikely to wipe out all humans. We need to think about the future and get our heads out of the sand.
Just to be clear, you definitely shouldn't be worrying about climate change or any other overly hyped up issue. Your life is short and all you can do is be the best person you can. If you care about the environment go do so.e good for the world. Don't spend time worrying.
Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point 👍
Climate change is indeed the perfect example, because if we bothered to do anything about it on a societal scale instead of saying "oh well, use paper straws I guess" we'd have had a chance at stopping it and it wouldn't be so apocalyptic.
But instead, we've consistently done very little because it's always seemed too far away to matter, but by the time we start to feel the effects it's basically too late. Realistically, I don't think it's about anxiety necessarily, I think people just don't want to change their way of life. It seems like everything might work out, and little changes like carbon taxes and paper straws might mean we can keep going normally and feeding the consumerism machine like normal while driving everywhere.
As an aside, the heat death of the universe is utterly irrelevant, we'll be dead long before then. And if not, then that will be such a glorious existence for humanity that I'd be happy to die with the universe itself. I just would rather not die stuck on our own rock, choking on our own emissions that we refused to do anything about.
Was it ever there?