Love affairs begin with the thrill of an infatuation, and there’s always a risk of neglecting what’s more important.   We’ve had a long growing infatuation with technology, and reinventing our lives over and over, for example.    Such infatuations become just fond memories for how a true love began, if it’s true love that emerges from it, of course.   Whether it’s the beginning of a true love or not, is the question, as for any dream of expanding promises.

Write your own story of a love, a dream of promises either kept or not, as hasty as a smile shining light into two lives or as drawn out as the dreams of mankind and our many centuries of wandering from one wilderness to another in search of why some loves do last. but so many just don’t.

Getting lost in infatuations is one way, as with dreams of wealth, and so making the great errors of expectation and so losing it all.  Our infatuation with rearranging our planet ever more rapidly, consuming it as we go, has really gotten the best of us, and it has to do with money.  What would get us to commit to being its partner rather than its ruler?  That seems to be the question.

As an infatuation ends it will be measured by how responsibility was taken for making its promises come true.   Nothing at all comes from the thrill of making empty promises.  That’s more the character of our many decades of projecting limitless growth in using our environment, to keep the money of money makers growing, as it is being committed to in the face of proliferating ways in which our physical environment is deteriorating.

Keynes faced severe criticism and was largely ignored for pointing out that would happen.   Using his model for stabilizing economic and monetary growth, the viability of the model itself would come to a fairly abrupt end.     It becomes unprofitable to keep increasing demands on a natural world at maximum accelerating rates as a system for seeking maximum returns does.    His economic model would stop being self-sustaining, and society would need to give up its infatuation with using greed as a solution to problems of prosperity.

Keynes clearly saw and repeatedly said that environmental conditions would cross a line and the economic model would need to change.  He devoted the whole concluding chapter of his growth theory to the subject.    He may not have quite understood how to anticipate it, or that the line would be crossed as easily as going over the crest of a hill.   Like a race car following a plan to accelerate forever, continuing that plan past the crest of a hill would turn downward in a hurry.    Even today physical economists are only very clumsily struggling with how to measure the physical responsiveness of the earth to us, to know exactly where the “crest of that hill” is or how to have anticipated it.  It’s always been a clear inherent risk in our plans for managing investments for infinite returns though…

Getting lost in the infatuations of life generally ends with ignoring the greater responsibilities at hand.    It turns promises of great love into bitter tragedies and separations.    It’s remarkably easy to do.   It’s also remarkably easy to not learn from it and not become wiser next time too.  It seems to be that infatuations themselves are kind of exploding belief systems, and the time to let go of them is when they seem to have the most freedom to further expand.

Mankind has been “not learning a thing” from the experience of creating vast promises of wealth that only collapse the environment they’re in since the very beginning of history it seems.   We repeatedly get an infatuation with stabilizing greed, treated as a general solution for prosperity, over and over and over, to our bitter disappointment.    Our culture has just never learned from it.   Today open general discussion of why stabilizing ever greater greed might not work, and questioning the institutions of perpetual growth that go with it, is avoided rater than treated as urgent.

The time to put aside the feeling of infatuation with a new love, in order to make it real, is at the very first hint of approaching limits.   It’s not delaying that recognition as long as possible.   It’s the test of every love affair small and large, as apparently every kind of new living thing in nature starts with a self-infatuation beginning with dreams of infinity.  Following the path of the successful ones is to see how to let go of the glimmering promises that inspire you to reach for all you can, as in reaching you find something much better than promises.