We should each take personal responsibility for the future. Why?

• To solve the problem of diffusion of responsibility: if people think "somebody else will take care of it," it doesn't get done.
• For our own quality of life: it's too easy to let the small things take over our life if we don't see how valuable we can be to the future.
• Future generations deserve to have a chance at life, and Earth deserves to have Life on it for a long time.
• Time is running out. We've already lost most of our terrestial and marine ecosystems we had only a couple thousand years ago.

As part of being personally responsible, we should abstain from excess activitism and invest all of our energies into increasing our capabilities, especially mental health and intellectual development. Why?

• Without sufficient understanding, we are liable to choose either useless or harmful activities.
• Even if we were lucky enough to pick a useful direction, our progress would be woefully inefficient compared to if we first built up our ability.

Thus, we should set education as our highest priority, starting right now. And while we are learning, we should constantly ask ourselves, "is this the most efficient and reliable way to develop my understanding and ability?" We should be aware that the world needed to be saved yesterday, and that we are developing our abilities on borrowed time.

What would it take for you to live every moment of your life for the sake of the future of Life on Earth? How would your priorities change? What kind of person would you become? Would you value your moments more or less?

Eupriorities

"Eupriorities" is the position that holds that, for all practical purposes:

• Every moment, we make choices affecting our desires, abilities, and actions.
• Because of the way that time and causality work, each choice we make (or do not make) affects the entire future.
• We can select strategies with the safest chances of helping the future, rather than harming it. Example strategies include the pursuit of more education and mental health.
• The size of the future is infinitely larger than the size of the present, so if we care about the potentially innumerable creatures whose existence could potentially depend on our choices in this moment, we would naturally want to shape the pattern of our everyday lives to attend to these realities as seriously as possible. as best as we are able, especially when it comes to improving what our best can be.

Why not?

Why don't people live as if each moment might affect the entire future of life?

People have many reasons:

• overwhelm: too caught up in poorly coping with the details of their life
• helplessness: a belief that knowledge and skills are somehow innate, leading to a lack of understanding of how much progress is possible
• fatalism: a mental model of time that does not see each moment as irrevocably changing the entire future that follows
• oversimplification: mental models of reality that only considers actions or people above a certain threshold of "importance"
• ethics: ethical systems that value the future less than today
• self-objectification: blaming our choices on our personality, feelings, or circumstances instead of taking responsibility
• dissociation: a sense of numbness or the feeling that their life isn't real; and/or immersion in the world of experience

When we choose to not live as if each moment matters, what is the result? What happens when we do not take responsibility for increasing our capacities and ethics?

On a personal level, there is a loss of the self that might have been, and we miss the psychological depth that comes from integrating with the world. On a larger level, the choices that we fail to make in each moment become forever a part of the fabric of the world's history.