By nature, humans strongly weigh present consequences as more important than future consequences, regardless of their duration or intensity. This is dishonest. Those who weigh the present more heavily than the future will make choices that have negative long-term outcomes, and as a result, will experience greater and greater misery as life advances. You need to face the truth of what long-term consequences imply, no matter how difficult it is or what extremity of actions they suggest.
Too many willingly tread in paths that they know have such tremendous future costs that they are not worth whatever benefit they presently offer. Simply consider how many waste the prime of their lives in the pursuit of things that rarely last, to the neglect of those things which almost always do. How many women spend their youth rotating between promiscuous partners, only to struggle to find a quality person willing to marry them thereafter? How many men delay professional preparation only to find themselves without sufficient time left to earn what is required to have a high quality life and family? How many people live in cities known to seismologists to regularly experience apocalyptic earthquakes? The examples abound.
One form of dishonest appraisal of long-term consequences is acting contrary to them, but another is to fail to identify them in the first place by evaluating the worth of something only in present terms. For example, how many parents have investigated the effect of public school on promiscuity, gender dysphoria, obesity, addiction, self-harm, mental illness, or adult earning potential?
Once confronted with the consequences of their choices, so many claim that no one warned them, when in reality, they simply ignored the plentiful warnings.1 God is limited in what he can warn us about by factors that include our honest recognition that he knows better than we do. Those who despise correction will receive far less of it:
To whom shall I speak, and give warning, that they may hear? behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold, the word of the Lord is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it. (Jeremiah 6:10)
The penalties for willfully ignoring or rejecting reality include a total inability to recognize the most consequential and obvious consequences in life, ranging up to matters of life of death.2
Footnotes
- 1. A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished. (Proverbs 22:3) ↩
- 2. The profligate brothers Laman and Lemuel, who were spared from certain death during the destruction of Jerusalem by their righteous father and brother, lamented that if they had been left there, “we might have enjoyed our possessions and the land of our inheritance; yea, and we might have been happy.” (1 Nephi 17:21) They could or would not understand that the alternative to their situation was death—not happiness. ↩