Past, Present, and Future

I came across this quote from Thomas S. Monson:

"The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it."

This quote got me thinking, as of course a quote is supposed to. I began to look at my own existence, and question if I have lived it's meaning, because Star War's Qui Gon Jinn said something very similar: 

"Be mindful of the living force, my young padawan, but not at the expense of the moment." 

Of course, there is also YOLO, which stands for You Only Live Once. 

So I looked at everything and wondered if I met the requirements. What I found in my life is that I do not I spend too much time analyzing the past events that I have done. I do this so that I can discover the mistakes that I made in my childhood, that my parents made in their lives, mistakes that my friends and mentors have made, et cetera. I as I look at this, I realize that I am only meeting two parts of this. I am learning from my past, and doing everything that I can to prepare for my future by getting out of debt and working hard to get into a position at work so that I can make enough money to settle into a comfortable life (which I still got a lot of work to do to get there). But I am not spending enough time out there to live life. 

Or am I? 

Consider this....

If we look at this from the direction of a society. We should be able to answer this question. I say this because on an individual level we fill all the possibilities. However, when we look at it from a societal perspective, we can see that the overall answer to this question in many societies is that we do not.

If we look at the societies that exist today, some things that we can say are pretty much a given are:

• We all have some form of access to the internet, which means that we have more than 30 possible ways to gather media and news from around the world (unless you are in one of those countries that block traffic). 
• We all have some level of belief system of a spiritual sense, whether you believe in Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, the universe, or your own will to live (a.k.a nothing at all). 
• We all have interacted with someone of another belief system at some point in our lives.
• We have all learned something, whether it was in school or on the streets. 
• We have all seen success to some degree and failure to some degree. 

Now, let's consider the falsehoods that are made with these "given" things. 

First, we have to address the big elephant in the room. When a lot of us think of society, we think of those who live in a place where they do not have to hunt or gather for their meals, that shelter is in abundance, healthcare is some of the best, and the homeless and poor have some level of access to one of these three things. However, society is defined as "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community" in the Oxford Dictionary. This basically means that if people live in a group, and that group has some kind of order to it, it is a society. So, people in Africa and the tribes of the rain forest, yep, they make the grade. 

Second, we all should realize that in reality, not everyone has those thirty possible ways to access media and news. Approximately 3 billion people in the world have access to the internet, out of a population of 7 billion. Of that, about 1.6 billion of them are in Asia. That means that less than half the world has access to this tool. And if we look at this even further, after adding the 600+ million users in Europe and 300+ million users in North America, in all reality a little less than a billion people have unhindered access to different forms of media and news stories. Thus, in reality that 30 number that was thrown out there is probably more like 6 or 7 overall if you think about it. 

Now why should this matter? This matters because when you add all the things together, we can paint a societal view on the world, and that societal view is what we use to measure the saying against. Let's break it down....

"The past is behind, learn from it."

If we look back on all of the societies that have existed in our past, as well as the societies that exist today and their own individual pasts, obviously we should see how each one is connected to another with the same historical background. American society, for example, is connected to British society by way of the old British Empirical society that once existed. It can be argued that on a more tangible level that the United States learned how to exist as a world power from its past as a society that once existed as a British colony in the early days of the British Empire. Or perhaps the fact that China is a world power because it continues to use the fundamentals of adaptation to the landscape of what neighbors it has from the many dynasties that existed in its past. It can also be said that we are choosing to ignore the past in which societies were enslaved or considered lesser groups by other societies, as African Americans once were in the United States and Africa (well, their ancestors rather). Or, that in fact society is not learning at all, either due to the fact that someone wants to hide the lessons by destroying the monuments and clues left from the past (looking at you ISIS), or we are not ready to look at the lessons that the past can teach our societies by seeing where we went wrong. It is also hard to learn from our past because history is written by those who are on the winning side. A lot of the failures and wrong doings that could teach the present society is lost because the victors do not want to look like a bad choice to lead in the end. 

"The future is ahead. Prepare for it."

How does a society even prepare for the future? Well, that depends on the type of future that society wants and what type of future it needs, and which type it puts first. If the society is a more tribal society, and they wanted to be more like the technologically advanced society they call a neighbor, they would begin to mimic all the things that their neighbor has, as well as begin incorporating themselves into that society so that they can eventually become as advanced as their neighbor. If that society only needs better healthcare, they may still do the same things that I said, but make it their focus to better their healthcare and medicine needs. It depends on what is more important to them. 

We cannot forget, however, hidden agendas. These can change the preparation that is being performed quite a bit so that a certain future is achieved. What if that same society, who on the surface want to become more like their neighbor, but the hidden agenda is to eventually rule their neighbor? While the majority of the members of the society are working toward one of the two goals above, what they may not know is that the hidden agenda is quietly steering the two societies closer together so that they can quietly overtake the neighbor once and for all. 

In the end, it is these two things that will determine if society is indeed preparing for its future, and the future that will ultimately become the one that is seen with the most success and prosperity.

"The present is here. Live it."

This is the one where unfortunately society will most likely fail, especially if they are more advanced. If we take the American society as the example here, we find that Americans work about 36-37 hours a week. That is just under 8 hours a day. Add to that travel time to the office, a 60-minute lunch period. Time to travel home, and average sleep period, we can calculate that Americans are probably going to spend about 18 hours a day doing something that is required of them to live in the society that they do. That means only 6 hours a day can be spent living. Sounds pretty fair right? Well, it can be until you consider that a number of Americans spend that time not doing something that enriches their life (myself included if we don't include writing these blogs). Instead, we may spend this time taking care of family needs, preparing for the next day, working a little extra, or even unforeseen things like an accident or heavier than usual traffic.

I am not saying that this is not a good thing, not at all. It really depends on how at the individual level you define personal enrichment. If you like your work enough that you want to learn more and more from it, then you may enjoy working those extra hours to enrich your career. Also, of course, how is it not some form of enrichment to have time with the family? The point is that those 6 hours have a tendency to be whittled away in some task that is not going to make you as a person, nor the society as a whole, better off. Those six hours a day could be spent by society to enrich their communities, or each of the individuals that exist in it. Maybe to do tasks like saying hello to neighbors, hanging out within the community, hosting learning sessions so that people can be truly informed about groups within their community, group workouts or game days to create that closeness that we hope to have at the level of family and friends.

Even though I used America as an example here, this free time is different from society to society. There are some societies that are able to get some enrichment items done, but most of the time, again mostly seen in advanced or first world societies, we see that hidden agenda thing I mentioned earlier that works to direct the society to end up spending most of its time in recovery as opposed to enrichment. Divisions are created instead of togetherness. The list could go on and on.

So as we go through our daily tasks and lives, it would help if we consider if we are doing what this quote suggests. It works like the three Pillars of Life, which are health, nutrition (food), and shelter. Without one of these three items, we can find ourselves struggling for our lives. If we are not completing the three parts of this saying, we can find ourselves struggling for our sanity and safety at a societal level. 

References:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/