Which is more fulfilling to you, planning an event, or reviewing how it went after the fact? Has your preference changed over time?
Share why if you wish.
Category: Future
Is It A Wonderful World?
Sometimes it feels as though everything is awful. Does that feeling obscure how wonderful the world is? Or is it, in fact, not full of wonder?
It’s a simple fact that humanity faces existential-level crises, from climate change to species extinction. In addition, ongoing wars, uncertainty over artificial intelligence, political unrest add to an uneasy sensation that sometimes feels like it permeates everything.
And yet, there is great wonder in the world. There is stunning natural beauty, like waterfalls or mountain ranges. There are is an amazing variety of animals, birds, and fish that populate every nook and cranny of the world. In addition, there are man-made wonders that are a testament to our species’ ingenuity. We understand the world as never before, and have ever-increasing ability to improve things.
Of course, some of these are in conflict: our ability to impact the world is putting our climate future in jeopardy. We risk losing the amazing diversity that exists in the animal and plant world, which in turn endangers our own future.
But shouldn’t that add to the wonder, in fact? Just because the ecosystem is fragile doesn’t take away from how special it is. In fact, just the opposite: fragile, impermanent things can be the most wonderful. Think of, say, the intricacies of an individual snowflake, which exists for such a short moment in time.
As the famous song begins:
“I see trees of green/Red roses tooI see them bloom/For me and youAnd I think to myself What a wonderful world.”
Is that, in fact, true? Or does the peril we face, human stupidity and greed, and our uncertain future detract from it? Is the world wonderful?
Related questions: How can we maintain wonder? What’s the most amazing natural wonder you’ve experienced? What is the greatest problem facing humanity? Is it a cruel world?
Who Do You Want To Be Today?
Each day is an opportunity: where to go, what to do, how to act, and so on. Have you given any thought to what today will bring?
The typical lifespan will include nearly 30,000 days. That’s a lot of days! And while some heavily-scheduled days may leave little room for improvisation, for most we have choice regarding the details.
You might, for instance, get up early; you might stay up late. You could spend your time working, or maximize your personal time. Even if you have little flexibility, you can at least decide how to dress.
The decisions you make in the course of your day will help to define, ultimately, who you are. And the best part is that with 30,000 todays to choose from, there is plenty of opportunity to experiment with different choices. You are not locked in to one decision, and you can find what works best for you.
To make the most of all these choices, however, you might want to have some strategy going in. So rather than start each day wondering how you might want it to unfold, you may want to have a plan. Who do you want to be? Then make choices to make that person come into being.
For instance, let’s say you decide you are a little overweight, and in general not in good shape. You might decide to use a chunk of those 30,000 days to exercise more and eat more healthy food. Then you can make changes on a daily basis to reach that outcome.
In conclusion, who do you want to be today? And what decisions can you make this morning, to make that person come into being, both for today, as well as for the next month or more?
Related questions: What do you hope to learn today? Who are you? What is one thing you feel the need to do every day?
How Do We Make Our Food System Healthy And Sustainable?
America’s food system is centered neither on health nor sustainability. It is not organized around providing people with healthy food grown in living soil or produced on well-managed pasture.
Much of what fills grocery store shelves today would be unrecognizable to our great-great-grandparents. Thousands of available products are less whole foods than engineered food-like substances, containing preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial flavorings, coloring agents, stabilizers, and even so-called “food glues” used to bind processed meats together. On average, food travels roughly 1,500 miles from farm to consumer.
At the same time, an enormous portion of our food is never eaten at all. The USDA and EPA estimate that 30–40% of America’s food supply is wasted, with approximately $161 billion worth of food ending up in landfills each year. This waste is especially tragic given that millions of people in the United States and around the world continue to experience hunger or chronic undernourishment.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that 55% of harvested U.S. cropland is devoted to growing animal feed crops such as corn, soy, and alfalfa, a very inefficient use of land to feed humans in need of healthy food.
Too often, the true costs of our food system are externalized onto the soil, water, air, farm workers, rural communities, public health systems, and future generations. Within a genuinely holistic system, those costs cannot simply be pushed out of sight or absorbed by others.
This raises difficult but necessary questions.
Should truly nourishing food be priced in ways that fully reflects its real costs, even if that makes it more expensive? If so, should subsidies be redirected away from large industrial producers and toward low-income households to ensure access to healthy food?
Or should cheap, highly subsidized food-like products continue to dominate grocery store shelves while their real costs remain hidden in our environmental, economic, and public health systems? What other options are there?
How can we change our current food system so that it is both more healthy, and also sustainable in the long term?
Related questions: How do you stay healthy? What is keeping us from sustaining the planet? Do you garden? What is the greatest problem facing humanity?
How Do You Deal With Suffering?
Regardless of your lot in life, you will have to deal with suffering at some point, either your own or someone else’s. How will you handle it?
There are many different ways to go through difficult times. “Suffering” can be defined in many different ways.
One common type is to go through an emotional grieving process at the loss of a family member or other loved one. Because everyone dies eventually, we will all need to handle grief and the wave of emotions that can come with it several times over throughout the course of an average lifespan.
Similarly, the longer you live, the more likely you will have some sort of health problem. These can run the gamut from minor but intense to long-term, chronic issues.
There is yet another wrinkle thrown in when you have to deal not with your own, but the suffering of someone close to you. Even if you don’t experience the pain directly, either physical or emotional, watching a loved one go through it and being unable to do anything to ease that pain can be very difficult.
So how do you deal with it? Chances are, you have had the experience a number of times already, and will have many more in the future. So how did you handle it in the past, and how will you approach future events? Do you keep things bottled up, or share with others? Are you more likely to experience anger, grim resignation, or black humor? How do you deal with suffering?
Related questions: What is the worst pain you’ve ever experienced? What is the right amount of emotion? How do you deal with loss? What can you learn from loss? What are our responsibilities to others?