Are the Kids Alright? Flipping the Switch from Anxiety to Action

Is it harder for people to have long-term perspective these days? There is a thought out there that a way for us to get back, you know, not just to solve climate problems, but things like public housing, infrastructure, trade relationships, faith, cultural changes.

The way for us to address a lot of the challenges in our societies is to adopt a longer term hope.

view and part of this thinking goes our our time horizon over which we think about stuff has shrunk for a million reasons but often the current circled reason is uh the pace of capital markets and the acceleration of technology and the need to just have a new update all the time say in business or have some new iphone that comes out every year even if there isn't really a new innovation in iphones there's just a new phone every year capitalism yeah capitalism let's simplify it to that i don't totally believe this but i am i'm not sure i guess what i think about it but i am attracted to the idea that huh if we thought in tightly longer time scales that would be better so yeah whether maybe that's true maybe it's not true is it more difficult do you think now i mean because of pressures around us to think long term are we just focused on getting through the week or is it just always as difficult as it has been maybe

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I can speak to that, like from an educated point of view, because I think you would have to look at maybe social psychology and people's perception of time and the future.

What I can speak to is the fact that in trauma therapy, you know, one of the symptoms of PTSD is the sense of a foreshortened future.

is the term.

So the idea that after you've experienced something traumatic, an illness or death of a loved one, a big accident, a life-changing event, the sense of danger and the way that that shifts your sense of self and the sense of the world around you.

Like I've worked with people that have been victims of very serious crimes or had a family member that was a victim of very serious crime.

And that sense that, yes, cynicism, it changes your worldview about people and yourself in it.

And then it also changes your perspective on your own personal future, right? Life doesn't feel so certain, doesn't feel so secure.

And, you know, I wonder if some of the antidote to both our collective loneliness and our collective despair about the future might be uh working on on a sense of generativity which is like a in i think it's arthur erickson is a famous psychologist from like the 50s who did a work on um stages of life and so he said generativity was our last stage of life and that you have a he talked about the conflict so you can either um achieve generativity or you can go into despair and it's like the idea that you are passing things on to future generations.

So to successfully pass through this phase, you're developing a sense of connection with younger generations and a sense of what your life purpose has meant to the greater story of humanity.

And so if we could support community building and like, for example, our company allocates a small portion of our profits every month or our revenue, sorry, to our tree growing efforts.

And my friend from high school, I don't know if you ever met Lily when we were spending time together.

She runs a...

She's moved to Costa Rica and started a eco... project where she does uh she did her phd at cornell and now she does um environmental education and she works with women's organizations but she also does tree growing and she's corrected me it's not tree planting it's create tree growing because they not only plant the trees but they grow the trees to maturity which is much more effective and better for the world um And the idea that our clients are honored in their growth, that as you grow, the world becomes a greener place in honor of you,

which

is a nice little kind of gesture.

And then the idea that you feel connected to something that will benefit future generations could actually be very psychologically rewarding.