Bob Thurman and the Dalai Lama have a great argument for why we should TRY: it's more fun. I think they're right. Unexpectedly intuitively right, in fact. Feeling agency, feeling the ability to make change is way better than feeling helplessness, feeling despair. Of course.

From a long term perspective, Colin is absolutely 100% right that selfish people wouldn't drive to work and eat heaps of red meat, but, man, short term gratification is a pretty overwhelmingly powerful thing. Anybody listen to Mitch Hedberg standup? Someone sees him drinking red wine and asks, "Doesn't red wine give you a headache?" Mitch replies, "Yeah. Eventually! But the first and the middle part are amazing!" Maybe at the moment I'm just obsessed with the idea of not delaying gratification and the get rich quick economy. I'm about to move back to the USA from China after 3.5 years over here, and the more I reflect on what I've learned about this place, the more I'm convinced that it's the lack of long term thinking that's causing much of the trouble over here. Contractors see opportunities to save millions of dollars by not building according to code, pay one of those millions to auditors to look the other way, and get out of town. The market over here is so big and the economy growing so fast that long term trust-based business relationships and return customers don't matter. By the time the property managers find out they've been swindled and their energy bills are sky high, the contractor's off in Chengdu or Guangzhou building inefficient get rich quick buildings down there. The short term payoff of choosing to cut corners is unbelievably huge, and the long term pain is distant. Well that was a bit of a rant. Sorry. I guess part of the answer is to bring long term consequences, good and bad, into sharper focus. Selfish is good if it's long term selfish. Or am I crazy?