The continuation of earthly conditions that allows human flourishing rests with us

The preservation of earthly conditions that have allowed humanity to flourish rest with the present stewards the earth (that is you and I) living a more restrained life.

The earthly conditions that allowed
 humans to flourish will only continue
if all of us have a hand in helping
 reach the appropriate solution.

Our addiction to the hedonistic good life comes with costs that are beyond the fiscal; ever since we understood how to derive energy from “ancient sunlight” (fossil fuels) we began to pay with our atmosphere, the foundation of life on earth.

The technological advances of humanity in the last two or three centuries have been wonderful and should be celebrated, but with care and consideration.

The accumulation of human learning has been wonderful, but now the trick, the real trick, the life and death trick, is to learn and understand how to apply that learning.

Human learning has been exponential and that has allowed food security for many leading to an equally exponential growth in population and the demands upon the earth’s resources, particularly from those in the developed world, have exceeded earth’s capabilities.

Many world leaders operate on the “crash through or crash” philosophy seemingly convinced that the latter will only eventuate is the neoliberals are not given free rein.

Those same neoliberals, and the growth at all costs supporters, are oblivious to, or are psychologically unable to cope with the fact that we live in a finite world.

Probably decades ago, our “learnings” should have enabled us to understand earth’s finitude and though that accepted and worked toward creating a more restrained way of living; a way that was not dominated and controlled by the accumulation of a human construct, that being money.

A vastly more important value in life, a value that is not a human construct, is that of relationships; relationships that can be honed and developed from the creation of strong local neighbourhoods within communities, largely ignoring that accumulation and growth at any cost paradigm presently promoted with vigour by the neoliberals.

 The Four-Hour Work Day might seem an impossible dream, but in the early 1990s the Internet and its associated benefits, seemed little more than a dream, but without it today’s business world would grind to a halt.

Landing a man on the moon once seemed like a dream and now it is simply history.

Maybe you could argue about the impossibility of the Four-Hour Work Day but as convincing as that might be it is an argument to which the world will pay no heed.

Unless we can understand the importance of us living a more restrained life, the world is going to produce an argument to which we will have no retort.