Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good?
If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:
- The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
- Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
- In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.
What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?
By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years.
But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?
(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)