So where do most people's focus lie?  What I mean is, if you take all of a person's effort in their lives and divide it up into categories, what gets the most attention?

I think that for most people, it is divided into three categories: Self, Family, & Society.  The self category includes body maintenance activities (eating, exercising, etc), education, entertainment, or anything where focus lies only with oneself.  The family category is where one expends effort to make their family's lives better.  The society category involves making the world (or a small corner of it) a better place.   There could be a lot of overlap.  Your career, for example, could benefit all three.

Now obviously I'm only talking about the people that are expending effort to make the three categories better.  We'll ignore the large amount of effort going on out there that seems focused on making things worse.

Let's say, that on average, a person's effort is divided equally amongst the three parts.  Ok, who am I kidding.  Probably a closer guestimate would be 60% self, 30% family and 10% society.

I wonder what our world would be like if we threw a fourth category into the mix.  Have everyone spending at least a little bit of effort for a category called 'future society'.  I'm not talking about saving money for your grandkids, but something a tad more extreme.  Try to imagine having an impact on our society ten thousand years from now.  I think for most people it's a time span too ludicrous to imagine.  Ten thousand years ago, human beings were still using stone tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolithic), so ten thousand years from now I would think there would be as many drastic changes.

But those people ten thousand years ago did things that eventually benefited us.  They eventually figured out how to farm which led to larger populations and so on and so on.  Without realizing it, they allowed our society to exist.

Now, I can only assume that advancements we make today will benefit our descendants ten thousand years from now, but that's not the reason we are making the advancements.  We're advancing because we want to help ourselves now.

I would guess that most people don't think about their actions having an effect on people ten thousand years from now.  Consider this, do you think it is possible that some historian in the far future could look through an archive, pull up a file and watch Star Wars?  I think that unless something drastic happens to our society, this is easily probable.  And that is just a simple entertainment show.   On a more morbid scale, some nuclear wastes remain radioactive for up to 100,000 years.

I wonder what our society would be like if we adjust those percentages to be 59% self, 29% family, 10% society and 2% future society.  It seems like a small shift, but if everybody did it?  I think it would be a good thing, even if it all it does is get people thinking more about the consequences of their actions on a larger scale.