I read somewhere once that humans can sense time, but we’re just not so great at it.
Time, as referred to in this post, is a collection of all that was, is and will be. And what we struggle the most with is not so much of what has happened but more so of when something will happen.
And a legitimate reason for humans to struggle with long-term thinking is that we’re psychologically programmed to react to things that threaten our survival. A great example of this is when our body quickly chooses between “fight or flight” in a sudden scare’s moment.
But if you ask anyone to map out what they will do next week Saturday, they probably wouldn’t be able to do so (because how can they worry about next week Saturday if this Friday hadn’t passed yet?).
The ability for us to react to things in the moment has led us to where we are. And you can take that statement to feel two of many emotions: 1) grateful for it and praise it as the reason we’ve survived, or 2) dreadful of it and afraid that it will lead to our demise.
And if you deconstruct it a little more, they aren’t completely independent of each other; 1) is distracted by the past and 2) foreshadows of what’s to come.
Perhaps our problem with our approach to the climate crisis is not a struggle of our relapse of time but of our human struggle of focusing our attention on present distractions.
One way an earth enthusiast can make the climate crisis relatable is to stop referring to it as a point in the “future,” so that it doesn’t feel like a faraway thing. And to individualize the ‘distractions’ of the climate crisis so that the community identifies and understands the shared but personal struggle.
Because we’re not bad timekeepers, we’re just easily distracted.
