What do we have to offer to the future?  What do we love and dislike from our past?

As time passes what is created in its wake is determined by what the conscious beings leave in their wake.

We are the new builders. We are building the present on the works of the past. Whatever mankind has done, it has done. That has brought us to this place: the present. What we have to work with is created in our past: cities built on ancient ruins and cities built in what was wilderness. Here they are.

Our ancestors also play a great role in how we build the future as we have inherited their attitudes and tendencies. We as a species have momentum in individualism and distinction from the natural world and invest more and more in artificial environments.

Individualism should not be demonized nor lionized. It is simply a survival strategy that has served us well.  Even now it must be noted that those with a desire to equalize the distribution of wealth do so because of individual suffering.

We learned to distinguish pleasure from pain and create an environment geared toward human pleasure regardless of the environmental suffering. This puts us on the materialistic path.  the path of satisfying individual needs was written in the DNA. Even after we have gathered together in cities, we continue to react to our environment with basic survival skills.  In our brains, we have the amygdala. It is an emotional center which rules the fight-or-flight response among other things. This brain center is still here, and here it will stay.

What we see on the Earth is that individuals have cycles, life cycles, seasonal cycles, and especially reproductive cycles.  Perhaps we should consider that we aren’t the only species in the universe to dominate a planet with technology.  How would such a population transit from the focus on individual pleasures to planning the future or their species?

So what are we building? We can see that we are living on what those before us built and we are passing on whatever we build now.  What’s it going to be?  Do you want to have more conversations like this?  Shall we make a conscious future plan or let what we’ve done determine where we go?  It’s not what’s happening in the environment. It’s what are we doing to create the future.

Think about this for a while. Let me know what you think in the comments.