Values changes are significant because they have major impacts on the lives of people and other beings. But from a longtermist perspective, they are particularly significant compared to other sorts of changes we might make because their effects are unusually predictable.

If you promote a particular means of achieving your goals, like a particular policy, you run the risk that the policy might not be very good at achieving your goal in the future, especially if the world in the future is very different from today, with a very different political, cultural, and technological environment. You might also lose out on the knowledge that we will gain in the future, which might change whether we even think that this policy is a good idea. In contrast, if you can ensure that people in the future adopt a particular goal, then you can trust them to pursue whatever strategies make the most sense, in whatever environment they are in and with whatever additional information they have. You can therefore be fairly confident that you have made the achievement of that goal more likely, even if you have no idea at all what the world will be like when those future people act.

Positive moral change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long, hard work by generations of thinkers and activists. And if there’s any change that’s not inevitable, it’s concern for future people—people who, by virtue of their location in time, are utterly disenfranchised in the world today.

If we are careful and far-sighted, we have the power to help build a better future for our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren— down through hundreds of generations. But we cannot take such a future for granted. There’s no inevitable arc of progress. No deus ex machina will prevent civilisation from stumbling into dystopia or oblivion. It’s on us. And we are not destined to succeed.

Keeping P and PC in balance makes a tremendous difference in the effective use of physical assets.

Second, I would suggest that you shift your paradigm of your own involvement in this material from the role of learner to that of teacher. Take an inside-out approach, and read with the purpose in mind of sharing or discussing what you learn with someone else within 48 hours after you learn it. If you had known, for example, that you would be teaching the material on the P/PC Balance principle to someone else within 48 hours, would it have made a difference in your reading experience? Try it now as you read the final section in this chapter. Read as though you are going to teach it to your spouse, your child, a business associate, or a friend today or tomorrow, while it is still fresh, and notice the difference in your mental and emotional process.

Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment. It’s obviously not a quick fix. But I assure you, you will feel benefits and see immediate payoffs that will be encouraging. In the words of Thomas Paine, “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods.