Why caring about people two hundred years from now matters

HostI was walking through the park the other day and saw a man planting a tiny sapling, a slow-growing oak. He was clearly in his eighties, and it hit me that he'll never, ever see that tree with a full crown of leaves or sit in its shade. It was a small act, but it felt like a gift to a stranger who hasn't even been born yet. Why do we feel that pull to look out for people who will only exist long after we're gone?

GuestIt's a strange thing when you really stop to think about it. Most of our lives are spent dealing with what's right in front of us. Our friends, our kids, the person next to us in line. But there's this bigger idea that the people who show up in a hundred or two hundred years matter just as much as we do. Their lives will be just as real as ours. They'll feel joy and pain and love. The only difference is that they don't exist yet. If we think that every human life has a kind of basic worth, then it shouldn't really matter when that life happens. A person living in the year twenty-two hundred has the same claim to a good life as someone living right now.

HostBut we can't even know what they'll want or what their lives will look like. I mean, think back two hundred years. Someone in the early eighteen hundreds could never have guessed we would be worried about things like the internet or flying through the air. How can we plan for their needs when we don't even speak the same language, in a way?

GuestWell, that's a fair point, but I think we can guess the basics. No matter how much the world changes, humans will always need a few things. They'll need air that's safe to breathe. They'll need water that doesn't make them sick. They'll need a world that isn't swinging between floods and fires every other week. We might not know what their jobs will be or what they'll do for fun, but we know what their bodies will need to stay alive. We're like the people building the foundation of a house. We don't know how the people living there will paint the walls or what kind of chairs they'll buy, but we know they'll need a floor that doesn't cave in and a roof that keeps out the rain.

HostSo it's about the physical world we leave behind. But even then, there's a huge gap between us and them. If I help my neighbor today, I see the result. It feels good. If I do something for someone in two centuries, I get nothing back. No thank you, no smile. It feels like we're asking people to be heroes for no reward.

GuestHmm, I think that's where the friction is. We're used to things being a two-way street. You help me, I help you. But the people of the future are completely at our mercy. They're like a silent majority. They can't vote, they can't buy things to change the market, and they can't tell us to stop messing things up. It's a one-way power trip. We have all the power, and they have none. This isn't just about being a hero, though. It's about being fair. If you found out that a choice you made today would make someone's life miserable in twenty years, you would probably feel bad about it. Why should that feeling stop just because the clock keeps ticking? Two hundred years is just a few long lifetimes stacked together.

HostI see what you mean, but it feels risky to focus too much on that. There are people suffering right now. We have kids who don't have enough to eat and people who can't see a doctor today. If we take our eyes off the present to worry about people two centuries away, aren't we just ignoring the pain we can actually see?

GuestThat's the toughest part of this whole way of thinking. It’s not about ignoring the person in front of you. It’s about not ignoring everyone else. If you think about the whole story of humans, there could be thousands of years ahead of us. There could be trillions of people who haven't lived yet. If we only focus on the few billion of us here now, we're like a tiny group of people at the very start of a long movie who decide to burn down the theater before the rest of the crowd can even get in. We have this huge weight on our shoulders because we live at a time where our tools are so strong they can change the earth forever. We're the first group of humans who can actually break the future.

HostIt's a lot of pressure. It makes our everyday choices feel much heavier. But sometimes it feels like we can't really move the needle. Does it actually matter if I use a bit less of this or that when the whole world is moving so fast?

GuestIt’s easy to feel small, but look at the things that lasted. Look at the way we use land or the way we build cities. Those things stick around. We're currently leaving things behind that will last much longer than two hundred years. Some of the waste we create will be dangerous for thousands of years. We're already talking to the future, whether we mean to or not. We're leaving them a list of problems to solve. The real question is if we want to leave them any gifts, too. The man you saw planting that oak tree was making a choice to be a good ancestor. He was saying that the world doesn't end when he does.

HostWe're essentially the stewards of a story that's much longer than our own tiny chapter.

GuestThe people born in the future are just as real as we're, they just haven't arrived yet.

HostThat little oak tree in the park is a promise that even if we never meet the people who come next, we still believe they deserve a place to rest.