Today, during the webinar on Inner Development Goals, the presenter asked us to participate in the activity to illustrate long-term multigenerational thinking and decision-making. He asked us to imagine the youngest person that we are close to and the oldest person. We were to reflect on what the world was like when the oldest person was the age of the youngest and what it will likely be when the youngest will get to the age of the oldest. Also, he asked us to imagine what we would like the world to be at that point of time.

Naturally, I thought about my almost-five year old son and my seventy-one year old mother, not because she’s the oldest person I know, but she’s the one closest to me. 

My mother was born one year before the end of the reign of Joseph Stalin (I had never realized that before!) in a small Ukrainian town called Radomysl. When my mother was the age of my son, she was growing up in a country ruled through oppression, terror and ideological brainwashing. It must have been the time when the survivors of the GULAGs were slowly returning to their places of origin. It was a time when the USSR and the USA were racing towards sending the first man to space. It was also the time when my mother’s family couldn’t afford simple things like a washing machine or a refrigerator. They had running water, but the toilet was outside. My mother told me that her biggest dream was to have a store-bought doll -only her Jewish friend had such a luxury, she had to make do with a home-made ragdoll.

Yet, it was also the time when they lived simply and sustainably. When I was young, my mother used to take me to Radomysl to visit her aunts (her own mother had passed away before my birth), so I remember the houses and the yards vividly. The houses had no front yards. The back of the house was facing the street, whereas the front entrance faced the backyard. There was a chicken coop, some fruit trees, berry bushes and strawberries and many rows of sensible vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots and, of course, beets. People who had space planted potatoes. Potatoes and cabbage were synonymous with Ukrainian survival not only during my mother’s childhood, but also during mine. At the edge of the vegetable patch people would plant corn and sunflowers. People hauled most of their food from the local market (shops were truly miserable). In the summer, they made jams and preserves- it wasn’t some kind of hipster utopia, just simple survival. 

My son was born in one of the most prosperous countries in the world one year before the global pandemic. He is growing up in the time and place where the stores have every kind of fruit and vegetable in any season, where Netflix serves him entertainment à-la-carte at will, where distance and time difference almost disappeared thanks to advanced technology. It is also the world where the ecosystems are dying, the facism is coming back from the oblivion, the inequality of growing and genocides are happening in front of our eyes. My son will reach the age of my mother in 2080. As I type this date, I have a vague sense of dread and no desire to dwell on the details. Will there be glaciers? Virgin forests? Life in the ocean? What will the temperatures be like? Will there be snow? Tornadoes? Will he be able to vote? Will there be a nuclear winter after some power-crazed male finally pushed the button? I do not idealize my mother’s childhood, but somehow it sounds less dire than my son’s old years.

I will take a break now and tomorrow I will try to think up the world I want in 2080.