A running problem for our society is that our individual temporal planning horizons are too friggin short. On average, any one of us will live at least 75 years

A running problem for our society is that our individual temporal planning horizons are too friggin short. On average, any one of us will live at least 75 years, and most of us will live at least a decade longer. The older we get, the more we’re reliant on institutions and other people to take care of us. Given that, things like school lunches, after-school programs, and anti-pollution measures are shockingly cheap - you’ll live your twilight years in better health and in the care of better adjusted, smarter people who don’t have a cultural memory of your generation fucking their generation. Same with prisons, mental health resources, and programs for the homeless: we live in the societies that the people affected by these programs (or their lack thereof) will return to and we suffer the effects of defunding these programs in our daily lives. That’s not the debate we have about these, though - our discourse on almost any major policy considers an effect 20 years in the future to effectively be happening to someone else, and when we inevitably arrive at the can we kicked down the road, we treat it like god left it there by mistake and we just have to deal with it now. There are things that convince me that whatever species eventually leaves earth to colonize the stars won’t be Homo sapiens in a meaningful sense, and this tendency is one of them.