The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.
What decisions would you make differently today if you knew you would most likely live to be 150? How would you think about your 50s or 60s? How would you evaluate your career arcs or investments or even the area in which you live?
One of my problems, so to speak, is that, in America, we tend to think in relatively short-term. In the Middle East and Asia and other parts of the world, they think in terms of centuries or 500 years or 1,000 years.
Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.
When I was growing up, you were supposed to marry and therefore didn't plan ahead. Planning ahead is one of the few reliable measures of class in the sense that rich people plan for generations forward and poor people plan for Saturday night, and by that measure, women have been lower class. We were less likely to plan ahead because we're more likely to think that who we marry and our children are going to dictate our plans.
The future for us is the foreseeable future. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to think of a 'long time' in terms of thousands of years.
In order to have a decent chance to be a communicating species, you would have to learn to think and plan and act over time scales of a century or a millennium.
A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?
