Interesting Times

How old are you? There's chronological age—your age by the calendar. There's biological age—your age at a cellular level, at a genetic level. There's mental age, there's emotional age. These ages often don't agree.

What have you achieved that will be of lasting importance? Some people want to make a lot of money. That is their life's goal. But what good is that goal? What does it accomplish? For a while, money allows you to buy more expensive toys than the average person, but you often cannot buy the things that are most important. You can't buy happiness. You can't buy love. You can't buy knowledge. You can't buy maturity. You can't buy good health—the certainty of freedom from illness. All the really important things are beyond buying.

What have you accomplished? You've spent your life getting to where you are now. What can you show the world for your decades of existence? Do you have plans to make yourself better tomorrow than you are today, better next year than you are this year? How will you do that?

Jonas Salk invented a vaccine to prevent people from getting polio. He helped millions of people, but he didn't invent that vaccine by thinking "what's in it for me?" He invented it and he declined to patent it, because he wanted the vaccine to be inexpensive and available to everyone. By virtually giving away his invention, he lost, by some estimates, seven billion dollars. He did that because of altruism: a concern for the well-being of others. That is a human quality that is becoming increasingly rare in today's society.

In many ways, we are going in the wrong direction today. What happens when people go in the wrong direction for a prolonged time? They get lost. What happens when a society becomes lost? The result is societal collapse: the loss of cultural identity and social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. 

Look at America's history and then look at American society today. We're not the same country. People believe things today that would have been laughed at fifty years ago, sixty years ago, seventy years ago. National elections can be stolen. We never went to the Moon. The earth is not round, it's flat. Vaccines don't work.

In addition to false beliefs, there are other signs. Political systems become dysfunctional. Systems put in place to prevent loss of life collapse when needed.

I read an abstract of a paper written by Parker Crutchfield at Western Michigan University that began, "The collapse of society is inevitable, even if it is in the distant future. When it collapses, it is likely to do so within the lifetimes of some people. These people will have matured in pre-collapse society, experience collapse, and then live the remainder of their lives in the post-collapse world."

I agree with Mr. Crutchfield's assessment. I think we are seeing it in present-day America.

There is a Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times."

I think we are there.