I have often felt a feeling of resentment and frustration arise when meditating on the changes to my lifestyle that would be necessary to achieve a more sustainable future. A frustration fueled by comparison to those who came before me who were allowed to live their lives without the level of thought and responsibility as our generation must have. A comparison to the freedom and ability that they had to travel, to grow, and to accumulate without so much guilt or worry.
However, I cannot think so individually, so much to how others were treated and how I deserve the same. Who ever gave me such entitlement? What divine being ever endowed me with the right of accumulation, the right of experience, the right of excess?
Perhaps we were only endowed with the right to life. And a responsibility to ensure that right is equitably dispersed. Amongst people, amongst animals, amongst beings. Instead of looking to how others were able to live, perhaps we should look to what was sacrificed for the sake of it. And then build new definitions of success. New aspirations predicated not on how we as individuals can attain as much as others have, but on how we each can provide for others less fortunate, including those in the future. Not basing our lives and our accomplishments on how much we have attained but on how much we have given.
This of course is something that has been professed by spiritual teachers and studies on life satisfaction for years, but that has been violently oppressed by capitalism, which survives on consumerism as value and fulfillment, on accumulation as success. Any meaningful change we can make necessitates abandoning preconceptions of success as equivalent to excess, and on forging completely new value systems for our institutions and as individuals. On prioritizing long term prevention over short term gratification. The Anthropocene entails abandoning that so purely human instinct of self preservation that drove us to this point in favor of equitability and universal identity. To get there will require both institutional and personal change.
Which comes first?