2527. What kind of life? Life cycle fit.

What we create should pass the test of enhancing all parts of the human life cycle. We have made a world difficult for children, parents, elders, poor, and animals. Children can no longer just ‘go out and play and come home for dinner as it gets dark.’ Our world now fits fast careers and traffic. We have built society around the part of the life cycle that has income and freedom to spend while forgetting relationships. We remain divided in our aspirations between wanting a life of security, continuity, and rewarding work, or seeking ownership that maintains control and guarantees dividends for the rich. We seek both peaceful equilibrium, and dramatic change. That is who we are, but the balance can be off and we get war or passivity. Much of the world of popular culture - games, music, media, sports, art, a world of consumerism,- is an angry world. Think of what society must offer for alienation to be less attractive than meaningful cooperation.

There will always, it seems, be scoundrels and saints among us. Each person, in trying to make a world for themeless, with the body and mind they have, takes on some of the character required by circumstances. For five centuries that has been living by the clock and the bank account where we have looked at people to fit in rather than be fully engaged with all their talents. I hope that Gardenworld will create circumstances with a wide range of possibilities for living different ways. Keeping the broader and longer term perspective in mind will be hard but worthwhile. Each person in a Gardenworld project should take this view: respect for the autonomy of each of their fellow human beings, and objective knowledge of what each truly wants and needs. The affections that draw us together tend to be smothered by the arrangements we create unless we all remain creative .