What Matters Most

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What Matters Most   Right now in America it’s a great time to learn from adversity.  We get an opportunity to reinvent ourselves.

Laurence Gonzales takes no pleasure in the realization that people are suffering financially but, “It’s a very graphic demonstration that even the least educated person can understand about how things can go wrong and how the people who are supposed to be our leaders can often mislead us.”

Gonzales believes that people can be smarter.

History proves that we can change our behaviors radically and in a good way.  Gonzales optimistically believes we can learn, adapt and change to new conditions, survive and create a better tomorrow.

We aren’t alone in this quest for learning new knowledge.  We are joined by the next generation of Americans, our children.  “One of our great hopes is, if we can change our thinking enough right now to become selfless and to be willing to [make] some sacrifices in our lives, then we can bring our children along with us, then we can help them to move forward into a future that looks pretty good.  If we don’t change the way in which we think and aren’t willing to sacrifice in the present moment, then they may face a pretty bleak future and that’s a very sad thing.”

Gonzales emphasizes “…if you care about people, whether it’s your children, your friends, your community, your religion, their connection to you helps pull you through difficult decisions and difficult challenges and makes you better able to do the right thing.”

Everyday Survival

There are lessons we learn from survival in the wilderness, which we can apply to Everyday Survival.  “What we need to do is stop and actually look at the world for what it is and look at our behavior for what it is, that becomes less efficient, but becomes a much richer experience.”

Gonzales shares a story about when he was a child.  His grandmother owned a ceramic rattlesnake ashtray that he loved, which was very realistic, and its coiled body formed the tray for the ashes with its head raised up in the air as if ready to strike.

Decades later, when he was hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains, he came upon the ruin of a stone house with shattered and broken walls, with only the chimney standing.  Poking around the ruins for a souvenir to take home, he discovered an exact duplicate of his grandmother’s ashtray, complete and unbroken, lying in the rubble.

As he reached down to pick it up, its tongue darted out, smelling his hand.  He found himself inches away from a fatal strike.  He carefully backed away from the rattlesnake.

His mistake in trying to pickup a rattlesnake is an example of how we need to stop and actually look at the world for what it is and our behavior for what it is.

Gonzales points out that this is how many of our mistakes in life are made, and this is how our mental models cause us to suspend reasonable doubt about our future.

“So, you don’t have to think because the mental model tells you [what to think].  You know what’s going on already, go ahead and behave the way you behaved in the past and everything will be okay.  And then, when the situation changes, it backfires on you.”

The Future

The way we’ve been behaving on this Earth is like we make up our own rules.  In some ways it’s true because a million or so years ago when our ancestors learned to make tools, build fires, they didn’t need to accept the world as it was, they could fashion a new world of their own making.

“But, now we take that to an extreme to the point where now we believe we make all the rules so we can do anything we want and that includes things like burning up all the coal in the world and getting away with it.”

Gonzales points out there are rules by which the universe works, and we cannot get around it.  There are costs to pay.  “You burn up all the coal in the world, you’re going to end up creating more and more entropy and you will wind up with a dead planet if you’re not careful because you can’t keep going in one direction with these behaviors and just not pay the cost.”

We need to change the way we think.

According to Gonzales, how we decide to use our intelligence is what matters most.  “The thing that sets us apart from the other animals is the type of intelligence we have.  Throughout history of humanity, we haven’t always used that intelligence in ways that benefited us and benefited others, in fact we’ve used it destructively instead of constructively.

“We’ve gotten away with it for a very long time and we’re at a point in our history where there are too many people…there will soon not be enough resources, and what we have to do is think like humans rather than animals.”