I am in large part a product of my environment. Like many others, I grew up during a time where everything looked like it was going to be okay. In order to thrive in such a world, we were taught values like kindness, charity and honesty, among others. Like many, I thus wondered why things changed so dramatically, where our values feel disconnected from how to actually thrive in this world.

I think that we declared victory too soon. We were blind to the fact that we were building on unstable grounds, discarding too much of peoples' suffering. And this is now coming back to bite us.

Lucky for us, the advent of social media has allowed much more of us to talk to each other with various degrees of directness, which in turn has made a lot of our blindness of each other's suffering to go away, and continue to go away ^[1].

I think there is thus a way back to enjoying the values we were taught. However, I think that we cannot hide from the fact that this way is going to be demanding to craft up. We are so many, with so many different opinions. A lot of these opinions look irreconcilable. But I think that all problems have a solution if you are willing to let go of existing constraints that limit our outlook, and instead venture into new solution lands.

^[1] Notice, in contrast, the continuing demonization of "boomers"? I think it is in large part a consequence of that generation being much more disconnected from our discourse than the younger ones. We do not quite understand their pain, and they do not quite understand ours.