RE: Is Our Wasteful Lifestyle Just a Repeating, Instinctual Pattern?
Great post as usual.
Humans do learn from their tragic mistakes in retrospect to past events, I think it just takes way too long sometimes. First World War? It took a second, even more tragic one for us to learn the extent of our actions. Sure, we still have wars but they're less deadly (statistically, at least).
Perhaps the underlying factor in these changes are the few people who step back and realise oh shit, it's almost too late. Let's stop using nukes... let's stop polluting the earth.
It takes the few outliers who care to realise something is off and (at least attempt) to make a change. Whether or not that change in our behaviour is made is a different story. Some geniuses at the UN realised that nukes were bad and attempted to denuclearise the earth but we still have countries like USA, Russia, and China who have those weapons just in case.
We can attempt to recycle and reduce waste as much as we want, but who is to say our future solutions won't cause more waste? It's a vicious cycle. Evolution is painfully slow. If our instincts are shifting, let's just hope its in the right direction.
Thank you.
We seem to learn better from recent mistakes than older ones. Take the wars. The generation that went through it learnt all too well and the generation born at the end grew up with the aftermath and rationing for many countries. Subsequent generations have known nothing like it, so it's been any easy life and they can only really imagine the impacts of it, but never really feel it. Each generation has become materially more spoilt. Now suddenly the teenagers and young adults of today are entering an environment where, after growing up so well provided for, they are struggling to get work and they've got a polluted world to look forward to. I think they will be the generation on the biggest learning curve and I hope they can rise to the challenge.