Mike, all of your observations regarding our current life of absurdity are spot on. Humans are extremely local in our thinking and actions; but our collective impact as a species (of seven billion and counting) is global. This global impact is most profound with regards to our collective actions leading to global warming—which results in extreme weather that is manifested in melting ice caps, rising seas, and massive shifts in the jet stream. We live in a present that is composed of a near future and recent past; but our climate destiny is already set with the worst outcomes accelerating now and going forward. Everything we do in the present (economically, politically, and socially) only locks in our turbulent (and likely unsurvivable) future this century. And we dilate the cone of time left for local survival to mere decades or less with each minute we exist in our blindness to the global outcome. We have tools as a species through our collective knowledge of scientific observation and analysis to see far-future outcomes, but we are incapable in our individual myopia of everyday living to follow actions that might bend us away from the straight line we are following to oblivion. We live our nature locally; and our nature is unsuitable to a universal theory of collective prudence over our penchant for ego absurdity. That is to say: we are screwed seven ways to Sunday.