>Short term reward seems to overrule long term planning and goals if the outside pressure is not there and we have a choice. I think the emphasis is wrong here

>Short term reward seems to overrule long term planning and goals if the outside pressure is not there and we have a choice. I think the emphasis is wrong here. Short term rewards overrule long term planning when there isn't room for long term planning. In modern society, it's not that long-term planning isn't emphasized enough, nor that internal will towards it isn't strong enough. To the contrary, we're bombarded with messages encouraging instant gratification. You'll notice that many long-term initiatives are bolstered by offloading either the physical effort or the cognitive load onto others: construction and farming are highly-mechanized and specialized jobs; retirement planning is done by experts, as is healthcare; education is a matter of enrolling in a program that figures out timing and curriculum for you. Of course, this paradigm favors individuals who have wealth. The idea of community is neither a panacea nor a platitude; it's a structural schema for offloading personal effort onto people who are concerned but dispassionate, routing around both issues of money and of direct biological impetus, thereby reducing the individual and collective load. Any workable solution to a systemic problem such as this is going to include other people, so we need to stop looking at it as a per-person engineering problem.