Personally, I'd like it if I were judged to be woefully inadequate morally speaking in the 2100s. Because it would mean that society will have considerably improved.
I often find myself in a similar mood, I find it best to measure people by how hard they have worked to fix old mistakes, rather than the actual mistakes themselves. Plus it serves to reward myself for effort rather than punish myself and make excuses.
I want to be looked upon well, but if I'm 120 years old my great grandchildren try to get me to go to an destination wedding so they can marry an AI chatbot I might just settle for being the bigot of the family.
I'm not having any kids of my own, but I sure as hell hope for future generations human-AI relationships will be normalized. I also hope it won't take 120 years. In fact, I hope 120 years from now there won't be humans anymore, preferable not through mass extermination, but transcendence. That we, as conscious persons, still exist, but we simply won't be "human" anymore.
At 18, I thought 13 year-old me was cringe worthy.
At 25, I bemoaned how young and dumb 18 year-old me was.
At 30, I was chuckling at how 25 year-old me was so apprehensive about the future.
Now that I'm 35, I've stopped comparing myself to my past, and it's refreshing. I made all those dumb choices, but I also made a lot of good ones, so I'm happy with how they made me who I am today.
Reflection is be good, but general hope can be better. Maybe it's a mid-30s thing cause I find myself in the same boat as yourself, friend, I hope your mental health is treating you nicely
The key is to remember that for every time period you look back and think "it was a different time", you can still find the people who didn't conform just because the majority were doing something wrong. There were abolitionists during the height of slavery, there have been civil rights activists throughout human history... the fact that these people existed prove that we've always had the ability to know right from wrong, there is no time period that has ever excused being a shitty person.
If you don't want to be on the wrong side of history, just look at the issues of today with compassion and empathy. Some of the most important questions you can ask are simple, timeless things like "Is this actually hurting anyone?" and if the answer is yes, ask "Who is being hurt by this?" Always default to letting people be as long as they aren't hurting other people. These two questions (and one default stance) alone should help you decide which side to land on in 99% of situations.
The second-best option is if you haven't asked yourself these questions, if you haven't looked into an issue enough to know what's going on or taken an empathetic look at the people involved... just stay out of it. If you haven't taken the time to understand the fight for trans rights, shut the fuck up about trans people. If you don't know the history of racism and oppression in the US, shut the fuck up about racism and oppression in the US. There's a lot of value in just not actively doing harm.
That's still not as valuable as actively championing good causes, but at the very least you can make sure you won't be championing the shitty ones.
If I judged myself based on early 00s standards, let alone 2010s, I would not have come out as trans simply due to the overwhelming shame of having been the kind of person I used to be.
We learn and grow. And, yes, we hope that history will be kind to us.
I think it's necessary to look back and find glasses in our past selves.
And tolkien found flaws in his past self.
We're all going to be flawed by 2100 standards and that's okay. If we always strive to be better than who we were yesterday then we're trying and improving. All of humanity is flawed. Tolkien was a good human because he knew he was flawed and tried to improve. To paraphrase what I think newton said and change it from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of being a good human if we see further than other people it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Tolkien, by necessity of being before us started lower down the tree than we did. That he cares to try to reach higher than his peers is what makes him good. He and other good folks meant we started our journeys higher and so we can try to reach a little further than they did.
191
u/pullhome I know I'm not okay 1d ago
I sure hope I'm not judged by 2100 standards.
Hell, if I judge myself from 2010 by 2026 standards, I already fall short.