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Death Is The Worst Threat To Long Term Thinking
Nobody cares for their great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren, because everyone expects to be dead by then.
Unlike what literature has always told us, the quest for immortality isn’t necessarily an unhealthy ambition. In fact, I believe it is quite the opposite. Yes, I believe it is the prospect of dying that makes us an extremely unhealthy species for this world.
Most of us have seen the meme of a parent kicking a huge, inflatable beachball to his four-year-old, who opens his little arms to catch it only to find the force of the shot propel him backwards. The meme reads, “handing over the world to the next generation”.
I find political decisions are all too often assessed in terms of right or left, conservative or progressive, protectionist or liberal, and hardly ever analysed in terms of the generation the implementing politicians belong to.
In certain issues, we have seen an almost even split between voters above a given age and those below that age.
Imagine a country were to decide via referendum whether to go to war with another country, with the older generations mostly in favour of the conflict and the younger generations generally in opposition. Imagine the elderly were a…