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John Corsino| Guest Columnist

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum, wrote another Cape Codder.

Good satire grazes truths held in our hearts but pushed out of mind. It narrows a gap between the people we say that we are and what those people do.

The predictive value of Kurt Vonneguts observation on reckless self-interest is undeniable. We are rolling drunk, peering just weeks or months ahead while making choices with consequences that sprawl across generations. Were living under many influences that distract from achievement and meaning, prioritizing today far ahead of tomorrow, and abandoning an imperative to leave things better than they were left for us.

Our attentions are flipped. We engage with concepts like sustainability, community, and purpose tightly and superficially, but worry a great deal about profits and shares and other fleeting rewards. In an era defined by the dopamine treadmills, its no surprise that appearances might trump the qualities theyre supposed to represent. We were not always goers-through-the-motions, but the symptoms of our backwardness today are clear: our planet boils, debts amass, waistlines swell. How?

Our behavior has proven easy to influence. Manufacture of false insecurities the opening of emotional voids for brands to fill has worked so well that a much deeper sense of self-centricity has followed. Marketers incite a religion of instant gratification and eager paternalists wearing red or blue ties stoke it, because the idea that some other person or product may hold the answer to our problemsleads to votes during the next election cycle or revenues as thumbs hover over buttons that read "Add to Cart."

This conditioned impulsivity shifts focus from truth to triviality. We exchange deep connection with the world around us for control over personal desires. But the deepest danger of me-first consumer culture is the thinking it engenders: the kind that leads us to believe important decisions lie in the hands of others far away from or above us.

Fortunately, this is not so.

The force of commentary like Kurts comes from the acknowledgment it demands that these things dont happen to us, theyre chosen by us. Our systems are not immutable facts of nature: they are people, and emotion, and insecurity. And we actively perpetuate them, not because we agree but because a goading to look at ourselves as users or followers rather than as leaders and makers is so constant that we sometimes forget it is not correct.

We are stuck in a culture of Band-Aids: of passive and flimsy stopgaps that hold just long enough to hit next quarters targets or squeak through to the next term. It can be escaped.

There is a piece of this world for each of us to make better. With every decision to forego engagement with the real things around us and perseverate instead on petty conveniences, we let pass the opportunity to leave our mark and deepen the hole out of which future generations will have to climb. We owe to tomorrow rejection of this superficiality, and ourselves deeper purpose.

Status quo may feel insurmountable, but this proves that an organized whole can become much more than the sum of its parts. The essential truth we have forgotten is that we are our systems. We compose and control them. It will take planning and effort, but we can overcome the short-term focus that is consuming our bodies, minds and planet. It is a myth that commitment to the future can exist only at the expense of the present: adopting longer perspectives makes us better today.

John Corsino lives in Marstons Mills

See original here:
Taking the long view, taking control - Cape Cod Times