i asked @aweissman earlier this week “what is one framework you wish young people would stop using for decision-making?” he shared with me the concept of “ghosts and ancestors” which i havent been able to stop thinking about it he also wrote about it in 2019
Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud.
People tend to talk very casually about how kids are the future, how they will save the rest of us from climate catastrophe or whatever. This is so lazy. We must be right alongside them, and right alongside our elders too. Harry, the angel who connects us, said to me once how we’ll be ancestors too, how we gotta live for our future generations.
I fe
... See more“ We build our own prisons and serve as our own jailkeepers… but clearly our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self-images — that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past — the memory of earlier failures, the re
... See moreBut I'm inclined to think that we're all ghosts . . . it's not only the things that we've inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.*
Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.