219: Regretful decisions
I share thoughts in today’s episode I didn’t have the heart to share with family on their way to vacationing in France.
In my lifetime I’ve seen the world change and our understanding of it change from we can’t really raise sea levels to knowing with certainty that it’s underway and we’re causing it.
People younger than m used to think and hope that we’d slide by, missing out on the worst, hoping future generations would figure something out.
If you’re younger than about 80, I believe you know enough that you no longer live in a world where you can honestly believe others are doing it, not me, or plausible deniability.
Future generations have figured something out: reducing consumption, reducing how many children to have, enjoying what you have. I’ve embraced this solution and found that it is fundamentally about community, compassion, empathy, love, stewardship, and what everyone I know values more than willful ignorance or even clinging to those values applied to a world that no longer exists.
That discovery of community, compassion, love, and so on enables me to say that if you keep applying those values as you would in the world of the past, you will live to regret knowingly choosing decisions that caused suffering and misery.
Living in the world of the past has a certain charm to it when you want to play princess or prince, but no longer when you want to play jet-setter world traveler.
Accepting today’s world is hard, but acting on it brings joy.