Mutual Restraint

The Heirs of Misfortune

The month of October is over. This means it’s now November, in the fake year we call 2024, a number that is tied to a Gregorian calendar from 1582 that has never worked. But we don’t care. We inherited it, so we just added a “leap day” and keep using it.

There’s another US election coming up in which citizens are expected to vote for one of two candidates, even though polls have long reported that most of us think both parties chose unqualified candidates who represent a system we don’t trust or like. We want something else, but we’re also stubborn heirs of tradition, so we keep doing this.

We’ve also inherited a 1.6 million square mile “garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean made entirely of human waste (mostly plastics). It’s bigger than India, and there are four more, in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, South Pacific and Indian Ocean. We know how to stop them from growing, but it’s easier to kick that can into the future and let some other generation deal with it. Soon, we’ll be the ancestors they blame.

But these aren’t the only signs of stubbornness and unaccountability.

Google doesn’t “google” anymore. Companies now pay Google so their site comes up in a search. If they don’t, Google lists “sponsored” results that bury the real answer. This would be like if Xerox didn’t xerox or if Kleenex sold us sponsored snot.

And our phones record us. All day. Every day. Yet we continue to use them, all day, every day, enabling companies to track our habits, conversations, and lifestyle as “data points.” Most of us intuit, thanks to vague memories of Brave New World and 1984, that this is the first step to censorship and oppression, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves.

I had a friend who found a mole on his skin and knew it wasn’t normal, but he also really didn’t want to think about it or deal with it, so he ignored it. A few years later, he felt off and saw a doctor. Turns out the mole was an early sign of cancer, but by then, it was too late. He died a year later, in his thirties.

I know this is serious, heavy, depressing stuff, but maybe like my friend with the mole, we should stop escaping reality and not just think about, but make personal changes to help turn the tides against the “inherited misfortune” we blame on our ancestors.

Most of us have at least one unhealthy addiction or habit we cave into, and its usually because the momentum of the past feels unstoppable. But that's not true. Habits and addictions end when we end them. That’s literally the only way to quit something.

I get frustrated when people say, “We can’t change. We’re wired this way,” because we’re also wired to use restraint, which is how we change. Parents know this, former-addicts know it, and anthropologists do too. We’ve evolved from nomadic, warring clans into a mostly peaceful global culture, thanks to self-restraint based mutual trust.

Mutual restraint is why most of us trust roads someone else built to use cars someone else manufactured to drive among people we don’t know to get to airports where we trust pilots and planes to take us to nearly any place in the world with an airport, where we then expect to safely exchange money to eat and secure a safe place to sleep.

But that’s not enough. Now is the time in our evolution to stop blaming externalities and start using self-accountability and restraint with our peers, especially when they are not. Our world has become a tapestry and it needs your thread to weave.

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Joe Van Wyk is an author, father, and Christ-follower with over 30 years experience in photography, videography, design, and publishing. He has recently transitioned from urban street photography into mindful photography. Listen on all apps, or right here.