Humans are notoriously bad at thinking about the future. However, but when I was but a child, that wasn’t an issue because I knew that I was definitely going to die in a nuclear war.
That’s the story of almost every Gen X kid. We just took as read that at some point the USSR and/or the USA would do the final button push and everyone on the planet would be toast.
Best case scenario was a Mad Max dystopia where we’d eke out a dusty, shirtless existence bartering for petrol and water with our gently radioactive blood. Worst case was our still-glowing fossils would be an object lesson for future alien archeologists.
And it wasn’t even like our parents could convince us otherwise: the booms in baby boomers was, after all, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which ended WWII and started mass global relief-shagging.
But even as the first smart, desperate voices were saying “hey, the planet appears to be getting warmer, there are ways of stopping that, we should get onto that now” in the 70s and 80s we kids just added climate change to the list of things that we needn’t worry about since we’d be dead.
And now, to my constant surprise, I’m still around. And all the same problems which terrified me as a kid are still there.
And let’s be honest: the urgent will always shriek louder than the things which are important but down the track aways. But here’s a different tack: let’s all start thinking about our lives as though we’re going to be living a long, long time.
Because chances are you’ll be around for ages. If you’re reading this there’s every possibility that you’ll live into your 90s, with a level of health that would make your parents jealous and your grandparents accuse you of being a warlock.
So we have lots of self-interested reasons to opt into the idea that we need to do things now that will pay off later. But thinking ahead has also got benefits for society. And let’s be honest, we could do with sowing a few hope-seeds now.
And it’s never been more important, because there are a bunch of fairly important things going on which are going to mess up your future self, from immediate practical money-issues like government attempts to weaken compulsory superannuation to more existential things like the blindingly obvious horrors of climate change.
And right now, while we’re all preparing our tax and thinking about the year that’s passed and the challenges ahead, to extrapolate that a bit more – whether it’s consolidating your super, or taking notice of the environmental policies of the government and thinking not about how that’s going to affect your theoretical grandkids, but your slightly greyer self.
Basically, this is a great opportunity for us to go “so, what will I kick myself for not doing now when it’s 2040?” Because the more we do now, the better things can be later: for ourselves, and for the species as a whole.
Hell, panicking about the immediate present hasn’t worked great for the last few decade or so – what do we have to lose?