Short term Vs Long term

If you have been in the UK or Western Europe this last month, how many emails and messages have you had along the lines of:

“Hope you’ve been enjoying the warmer weather!”

“Hope everyone had a nice weekend in the sun!”

“Hope everyone survived the heatwave :)”

National emergencies were called, wild fires consumed huge areas on the European continent and many heat related deaths were recorded. And yet now its over its looked back on, at least in my home country of the UK, as some pleasant summer event. The same day, TV adverts for high carbon activities such as cruises and long haul flights were still being promoted, even as destruction was taking place. This recent event led me to think about how the climate crisis is understood by framing it in the short and long term.

Traditionally, we humans have needed to focus on the short term in order to survive, there’s no good planning for the future if you don’t know what you’re going to eat tonight. But with climate change this threatens our ingrained survival thinking, because the long term is how we will survive. Our way of thinking is holding us back. So while many may will see the recent heatwave as a one off, a hot couple of days but otherwise a fluke that is nothing to worry about, the science has been warning us of this for years. What we have experience this summer, just like the floods of the last decade and the pandemic, are just a tiny teaser of what will be to come if emissions of greenhouse gases do not drastically reduce soon. Its more than an email greeting, its a warning.

So more gloom, because we are all doomed? It is true that planet Earth is not happy – 40 degrees in the UK is not natural. But this is just the beginning. We all know if any object is rolling down a hill it is easier to stop it near the top rather than halfway when it is more difficult to break its momentum. So we can’t afford to brush off the short term and wait for the next emergency to be declared. We have to retrain our brains to see the bigger picture and the long term trends, understand our current state in that path and make the necessary changes now to fix it.

This idea is true of a lot of current society. As a species we are losing our ability to create and listen to our own thoughts. We spend our lives following the rules of others and scrolling our phones until even 30 second videos are too long for our attention span, until we lose the ability to have our own unique thoughts. The people we vote in to lead us have no long term plans because they only create policies to see them to the next election, which even if they keep the jobs means only a few years of (debateable) stability.

The system no longer works. This post didn’t intend to start a guerrilla campaign, but the truth is to tackle the huge issues of our time, we have to think bigger than us and than today. You, the person reading this, have the power in that little brain of yours to think up big ideas and solve big problems. You don’t have to be like them. Break the cycle. So turn down the structures dumbing you down, you don’t need the things in the adverts, you aren’t a manufactured worker for your political leader, and you can see a future beyond today. If we stand the chance of having a lifespan similar of older generations today, then we must be forward thinkers and refuse those not joining us. Are you in?

Is Earth now your idea of a perfect planet? Destruction, war, inequalities….? Or do you think we can do better?

Action now, a life worth living later.