The Good Ancestor

How might we affect future generations?

What is missing from the world today is a sense of responsibility about the future.

Indigenous communities called this being a good ancestor. Many different First Nations tribes have long-standing traditions of considering seven generations before and seven generations ahead with every decision.

If only we all did the same.

One of the exercises in my book is to imagine yourself reading a letter from a distant future being. “Decide what kinds of things this person might thank you for. Whether it’s instilling certain values in their parents or ancestors, specific behaviors that you did, or major changes that you influenced.” What kinds of things did you do that made their life better? It doesn’t have to be huge - something simple like hanging your laundry on a line or riding your bike counts. What might you be thanked for?

my grandmother Mary, great-grandmother Katherine holding me on her lap, my mother Lois

Desire to be a good ancestor doesn’t come from being a parent. I’m not one, but it’s something I think about all the time. It’s not a personal legacy that I want to leave behind, but a collective one. I want to know that the world was better for having been here.

Is this selfish? Maybe a little. Without kids, what does a legacy look like? But, as a GP therapist, I know that kids are all kinds of messed up. 75% of them feel their future is frightening. 

And that’s on us.

I think about this a lot. The sense of complicity eats me up sometimes. I suspect that’s true of others, and one common strategy is pretending that we don’t care. Sometimes pretending makes it come true.

If each of us, especially those in powerful positions like politics or business, decided to make choices that might change their minds, the world would look tremendously different.

Let’s look at just a few case examples. We’ll start with the environment. Every scientific metric is showing us that the climate emergency and ecosystem collapse will take place within a few decades at our current trajectory. If we were making each decision based on the concept of being a good ancestor, we would be trying to leave the environment in a better position than when we entered adulthood. Because this really shouldn’t be on the youth.

As I said in my TEDx talk earlier this year, we should be letting the youth know that this is not on them to solve, that we have a deep responsibility, and that together we will figure it out. I feel a lot of guilt when I consider the planet they’re inheriting and my own role in that.

Sometimes I think - do I have enough solar panels? (The company told me I had too many.) Why do I fly so much? I don’t eat a lot of meat, but my dog sure does. I try to give away a lot of money to causes that matter or support those I love. Am I doing this from guilt? Or from a desire to be a good ancestor?

Are we all trying?

I think so. We’ve made a lot of headway. An example is the millennium development goals, now called the sustainable development goals. The progress has been remarkable. Many nations have improved their health and education systems, their quality of life and their mortality rates. But if we were being good ancestors, not just to our own kin, but humankind, this would have sped up. Because we, in the Global North, still steal a lot of resources and life hours.

For example, nobody should be experiencing so much poverty or lack of resources that they go hungry. This isn’t just true in drought-stricken Africa or rural Nepal. This is a truth in our own backyards. In the US, 16% of all children currently live in poverty, that’s more than 11 million kids as of 2023.  Numbers are similar in Canada; in both countries about one in five kids live without certainty of getting their basic needs met. Stable housing, nutritious food, feeling hopeful about their future. Scenarios that are only worsening due to climate instability.

Poverty is considered an adverse childhood experience, and sets people up for lifelong problems with physical, psychological, and social health.

Would a good ancestor allow this?

And this is an easy problem to solve. We have enough resources - financial and nutritional and many other measures - to alleviate poverty and malnutrition around the world.

I’ve personally seen poverty in northern Ethiopia, mountain regions in the Himalayas, and on a farm bursting with food in Uganda (they have to bring all the produce to market, even as their kids go hungry). 

Traditional boma hut in Uganda

I’ve also seen it here in Canada: kids going hungry to school and parents sacrificing their own meals in order to keep them fed.

Being a good ancestor is a mindset. It’s so far beyond being a good parent, because if we were to consider seven generations in the future, with every decision that we made, we would always be trying to make the world a better place. Not for one person, but for everyone. 

How might we reimagine our nuclear family to be a global family? 

This is a difference between collectivist and individualist cultures. And it’s the decisions within the individualistic cultures: every [hu]man for themself (or the meritocracy where we believe that people deserve what they get), where selfish decisions affect the collective outcome. 

Because this won’t change from policy or rules. It’s a collective mindset.

How can I be the best ancestor? How can we?