The distant future is considered to have irrelevance because as we stand queasily at the dawn of a new globalism, advancing technologies also tempt us to envision permanent solutions to unknowns. In medicine and poverty-fighting programs, that tendency can be downright harmful.  For instance, renters in Richmond, California USA are being evicted from their rent controlled housing so owners can raise rents to the maximum and gain more revenue, as rent increase and eviction moratorium is blocked by mayor and city council members. In business, likewise, our attempts to predict the future in light of ambiguous odds often backfire. These considerations, however, do not carry us very far. The problem is that thinking this way robs that past, present, and future of their mystery. It treats the “us” of ten years ago as evolving and the “us” of now as finally developed, and it loses sight of how wonderful and frightening both the present and future are in their potential. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 8

 Our impulse to deny the unpredictability of the future favors neatening the past into a tidy narrative.  They do not show either that life is worth living or that it has meaning. Misconception and misunderstandings of this sort, stemming from aversion to uncertainty and our craving for order, have occupied us throughout time and space. We have seen how troubling mental conflicts, under a high need for closure, can lead us to seize and freeze, to grow servile or increasingly inflexible. Before tackling these problems directly something should be perhaps be said about the carious and totally arbitrary preference of the future. If there were not an endless cycle of the same kind of activities, and if instead it were like a journey toward a destination, life would not be futile. If some of our actions would have at least some reasonable meaning, if the present was followed by eternal bliss, life would be worthwhile. People are becoming more comfortable with interpreting ambivalence as deception. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 8

The brain does much of its necessary resolving and categorizing unconsciously, in the same way that we recognize an ordinary tomato at a grocery store of eliminate the conflict between moving lips ad sounds without realizing it. Our working models of the World are like the air we breathe. We usually do not notice them. However, even when we do not consciously pick up on anomalies, we remain exceptionally sensitive to them. What would make life no longer futile is some feature of the destination, not merely the fact that it is a destination; and what would make life worthwhile is not merely the eternity of the next life but the bliss which it would confer—eternal misery and torture would hardly do. About the bliss in the next life, if there is such a next life, there is no inclination to ask “What for?” or “So what?” However, if bliss in the next life is not in need of any further justification, why should any bliss that there might be in the present life need justification? Our perceptually powerful expectations o not merely guide how we simplify ambiguity. When violated, this also determine where we look for meaning. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 8

Yet something more—another persistent and powerful theme beyond our tendencies toward closure—is embedded in the stories and examples we have examined. When we work at puzzles, we are engaging with the shortfalls of out instinctual answers. A person driving to the beach on a crowded Sunday, may, upon finally getting there, reflect on whether the trip was really worthwhile. Or, after undertaking a series of medical treatments, somebody may ask whether it was worth the time and the money involved. Such questions make sense because the discomfort of a car ride and the time and money spent on medical treatments are not usually judged to be valuable for their own sake. Again, a woman who has given up a career as a physician in order to raise a family may ask herself whether it was worthwhile, and in this case the question would make sense not because she regards the raising of a family as no more than a means, but because she is weighing it against another good. Many successful men and women have found ways to unshackle themselves from the mind’s compulsive desire to eliminate ambiguity. #RyanPhillipe 4 of 8

Even within psychological science, we have seen that progression is not necessarily neat and linear. However, if somebody is very happy, for any number of reasons—because he is in love, because he won the Nobel prize, because his child recovers from a serious illness—and if this happiness does not prevent him from doing or experiencing anything else he regards as valuable, it would not occur to him to ask “Is it worthwhile?” Relinquishing anger bring us many benefits. We are free to experience emotional comfort ad ease, gratitude for the daily opportunities to grow and heal, mutual caring with another without subtle “strings attached,” improvement in healthy, and more life energy. These breakthroughs allow us to move up to a more effective ad effortless state of inner freedom. When we have kaleidoscopic mind, one which contains mirrors and colors, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated, it helps us to break free from the vise grip of our suppositions and be more creative. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 8

It is worth recalling here that we live not in the distant future, but in the present and also, in a sense, in the relatively near future. To bring the subject down to Earth, let us consider some everyday consequences: A man with a toothache does to a dentist, and the dentists helps him so that toothache disappears. A man is falsely accused of a crime and is faced with the possibility of a severe sentence as well as with the loss of his reputation; with the help of a devoted attorney his innocence is established, and he is acquitted. It is true that a hundred years later all of the participants in these events will be dead and none of them will then be able to enjoy their accomplishments nor any of the efforts involved. However, this most emphatically does not imply that the dentist’s efforts were not worthwhile or that the attorney’s work was not worth doing. To bring in the consideration of what will or will not happen in the remote future is, in such and many other though certainly not in all human situations, totally irrelevant. #RyanPhilippe 6 of 8

Culture determines how we reduce ambiguity and make sense of nonsense. Not only is the finality of death irrelevant here; equally irrelevant are the facts, if they are facts, that life is an endless cycle of the same kind of activities and that the history of the Universe is not a drama with a happy ending. All striving is pointless if it is without final consequence and that it scarcely matters how we live if we all end in the dust of death. My life has been dedicated to cultivating an empathy born of resisting that very reductionism. Striving is not pointless if it achieves what it is intended to achieve even if it is without final consequence, and it matters a great deal how we live if we have certain standards and goals, although we all may not yet be able to avoid the dust of death. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 8

However, in the future avoiding the dust of death may be possible through science and technology, but the more I read and learn, I am not sure if one would want to avoid passing on to the next realm. If eternal bliss is promise for those who have done well, leaving this World behind may be a blessing. My parents tell me the hardest part of dying is on the people you leave behind, but live a good life and we will all be reunited, and just because someone is rich or famous does not make them better, you are a child of God and that in itself is special, and focus on being a good person. Love unconditionally, learn to let go, and heal. They resisted simple, edifying stories that suggested a neatly categorized World. (www.thedeedl.com) #RyanPhillippe 8 of 8