Lipps is back home in Tennessee

she lost her home, her car and even her dog

At least there’ll be a lot of very relatable music…

These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.

Derp. Now I get it. In my defence, I’m also an Aussie so understandably thick. But I live in the Arctic now, where we’ve got all three bears. But the scary white ones stay away from the woods.

A polar bear in the woods? They’re an aquatic mammal that lives on sea ice… Where are you from?

I need the home-work separation, or both suffer. I constantly get distracted from work with home stuff, and can’t be fully present with family at home because I’m thinking about work.

I regularly move between countries with different road side norms. Handedness is not an issue. Makes no difference.

Only problem is if you set off with no other cars on the road, to use as a cue, and so accidentally go on the wrong side until you see someone coming towards you.