It’s Sunday morning as I write this, probably Monday by the time this goes out and I simply wanted to share with you a simple thought that I have mentioned to a few people this past week. And they all look at me like I am just that. Stupid, simple… It’s how to save the world, the common sense way.
We are going through a period of advancement and change that humanity has never seen before. And yet we face some pretty big problems going forwards, with our environment, with plastics, saving wildlife and other big issues. Simple things which we really ought to have figured out by now as a species. Such as feeding everyone and having our basic needs met.
It’s really easy to save everything, to do everything we need to do. We have the technology, either now or on the horizon, to fix all the problems we face. We simply need to do one more thing.
We need to make it common sense and cool.
If it’s a cool thing to stop using plastics, the we will all stop it. We can see that already, with some amazing initiatives coming forth. We need to make it so that it’s so fucking obvious and uncool not to do it that everyone simply does it. No rules needed.
Do I think we can do it as a species, or do I think that we are doomed to simply keep in fucking up as we have over the thousands of years we have been around?
No, I actually think we can fix it. We simply need to collectively move to making things cool and obvious things to do.
I have written before about how you don’t need to tax people and punish them into doing the right thing. Most people inherently wish to be good. There are actually very few baddies out there.
So perhaps it’s up to all of us to one by one make the first steps ourselves. Not wait for some law to be enacted that we can complain about. Not simply blindly suck up the latest dumb fact going around Facebook that is easy to disprove.
You know the type. We’re better off building walls instead of friendships. Assault rifles are a great thing for the public to own. Renewable energy doesn’t work. Romanian gypsies are going to murder us all unless we leave the EU.
Unfollow.
For sure, there will always be a majority of humanity who doesn’t seem to want to be curious and see a bigger picture than their own immediate needs. And so it’s sometimes unfair to get them to accept that there’s more to life than the next selfie on Facebook, the next reality TV episode, the next cool item that you have to own.
So let’s accept that.
However let’s make it so that, for those people (and they are a majority, let’s face it), we need to introduce a set of shiny objects, shiny cool lifestyle things that they can share in their Instagram story. And those things are also good for the planet as well as being cool and shiny. Just imagine Love Island talking about saving the planet and renewable energy.
Yeah, I know…..
It we can manage that shift on perception, in coolness, then the clever tech people who know how to fix the planet will become empowered to move forward faster than ever before with an agenda that business and politics will quickly to wake up to.
And once it makes financial and political sense to be cool about our future, beyond a share price or the next round of political elections, then we really will have a movement worth getting behind.
And I think we’re getting there. Don’t you?
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