The world according to Kristen

    Have you ever thought about how the villains in stories never choose to be villains? How many of us wake up and think, "God, I want to be a villain today"? I'm guessing the answer is mostly no.

    I keep looking at the ultra-wealthy, those who have more than enough to, if not fix the worlds problems, at least lessen their impact, and don't, and I think about how, in a strange way, one almost can't blame them. After all, they never need to see those problems directly, they never need to think about how their actions affect others, so they never see any reason to help. 

    Time and again this happens, and time and again we keep building the same system. Nobody likes it, most of us know it doesn't work, yet we cling to it, because we don't know how to make a better world. 

    When I was younger, I used to think the world was a story written by somebody who knew how it would all end, and was writing the best story they could. When I got older, I realized that the story doesn't just have one author, it has billions of authors, each with their own ideas of what makes a happy ending. All of us are writers, trying to write the best story we can based on what we see others writing. We keep writing assuming everyone wants the same ending we do, that everyone wants to make money or go to heaven. We don't realize that some people want the story to have a different ending. In a lot of ways, we can't know that. 

    I don't know the solution. All I know is that everyone wants the world to change, but those who run society don't see why it needs to. They keep pushing this idea that the world would be better if we went back in time. I don't know how many people agree with them, all I know is that I wouldn't do any better in the past than I'm doing at the present moment. All I know is that the past wasn't better than today. I know things could be better, but the way to fix our world isn't to push for a return to the past. The past was based on ideas we no longer believe in, from a time where we knew much less than we know now. We chose to eat the forbidden fruit, and now we can't un learn what we know, if we even wanted to. Improving the world means admitting that the problem isn't that we know to much, it's that we don't know enough. We need to accept that we aren't even close to knowing everything there is to know about our universe, and that we in all likelihood will never know everything there is to know. Only by accepting and working within our limitations can we hope to be who we really want to be.