Our brains are physiologically wired for the short term. In the place we came from, there was no long term. The world before society was brutal. We are still running on that hardware.
Our brains are physiologically wired for a longer term than any other brain in existence.
Human minds are the only thing we know of that has any awareness of the future. So on the scale of short term to long term, humans are the longest-term thinkers there are.
We did prepare, and other than some people who just contrarians who refuse to care about anyone else the general population did follow directions for the most part and we were able to avoid our health care systems completely collapsing.
If you didn't know, there have always been members of society that actively work against any kind of communal inconvenience that is for the greater good. During the (misnamed) Spanish Flu epidemic there were anti-maskers and people who intentionally undermined any public heath initiatives.
Ok and when in your opinion has it been different? Some things just aren't so easily predictable and other things are predictable but people do not care because it mainly effects future generations and not them.
I think what we lack is the understanding that just knowing the right thing to do doesn't make it happen, individually or collectively. Because if you look at any of the issues we face you can find people talking about it a hundred, three hundred, a thousand years ago, but it's like the solutions only get traction under some special lightning in a bottle circumstances. So you have to keep up the consciousness and the effort and especially creative inspiring things, and know that the failures are to be expected and the successes are so rare they need to be celebrated even when they are imperfect.
Well said. What people fail to understand is that simply telling people how they should act is futile. You need to alter the conditions that cause people to develop dysfunctional social behaviors in the first place.
Dude we only survive because we don't look ahead. Imagine how bleak things would be if we couldn't forget about the inevitable heat death of the universe, the sun expanding, and the thousand other inevitable world enders between here then then.
Too much prescience causes anxiety which people shy away from. It takes maturity and courage to look at the future, particularly if it's an inconvenient one. And yes, climate change is perfect example.