Do you want to fear a future you resent, or focus on a future you create in the present?
Do you even want to know what happens next, if all it does is blind you from what happens right now?
Do you want to focus on a future you fear, if it prevents you from building what’s important, right now, right here?
What about second-hand memories? Accounts of past events we didn’t experience ourselves, wars, volcano eruptions, scientific discoveries,…
For knowledge to accumulate, to stand on the shoulders of giants, we need to transmit such lessons too. Not just as data or accounts of the past – also as memories.
But transmitting second-hand memories require trust.
Can we rely on the interpretation of others?
Who do we allow to control the narrative?
Parents? Elders? Teachers? Governments and politicians?
YouTubers? Influencers? Bloggers? Twitter gurus?
AI models and chatbots?
Objective data doesn’t exist. Objective memories don’t exist either. So if we can’t trust second-hand memories anymore, collective memory and our whole learning model collapses.
Daily practice without the pressure of daily perfection.
Consistency without guilt when you fall off the bandwagon once in a while.
Doing activities that make you feel good about yourself, not guilty.
That’s what a sustainably healthy life looks like.
You’re not embarking on a new journey, you’re already on the journey.
And while embarking on the journey wasn’t your choice.
Today, you have a say.
Not about everything.
But about enough to add some more intention and direction.
Tiny Trust Builders.
Benefit and harm all depend on your perspective. The futurist John Smart suggests looking at phenomena, trends, and events through four different lenses (the “Foresight Tetrad“):
Every level has its own agenda, but their interests are rarely fully aligned.
For example: for evolution and natural selection to work, a life form must have a reasonably short lifespan, reproduce quickly, and most importantly, not clone their DNA perfectly. Because small genetic reproduction errors help a species evolve and become better adapted to our environment.
Sn an organizational/collective level (taking all of humanity together) those genetic errors are a good thing. In fact, without them, human beings in our current brain, with our current intelligence, wouldn’t even exist. Not at a species level, and not at an individual level.
But to stumble upon a couple of beneficial “genetic errors”, evolution also needs tons of harmful genetic errors.
That means that every newborn runs the risk of genetic errors that can cause medical conditions, pain, and suffering – on an individual level.
We suffer individually to evolve collectively.
Another example: in our quest to improve the condition of humanity as a whole (at the organizational/collective level), we’re harming other species and change the climate (at a global level).
Ignoring the principles the universe and the earth as an ecosystem might well lead to collapse of that ecosystem – and result in the collapse of humanity.
The universe has an agenda.
Natural selection has an agenda.
The global earth has an agenda.
Humanity as a whole has an agenda.
Individuals have an agenda.
We can’t afford to ignore any.
Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.
We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.
A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…
Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.
Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.
It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.
Life isn’t all about the big leaps.
One more step.
That’s all it takes.
Just one more step.
