Planning to Improve the Planet - Part Six

Even if you no longer consider yourself to be young or youthful, you may current consider yourself to be more useful to the improvement of the world than you were when you were younger.

After all, an older age is meant to equate with experience and possibly even wisdom.

Perhaps at least one other person regards you as an elder, a preserver of important knowledge, and even as a holder of wisdom.

Systems can only be improved with quality reasoning.  That level of reasoning often arises outside official systems of power, authority and influence.

Within official systems, habit and peer pressure takes over from reasonableness more often than not.

Good investments mainly improve the world in some way.

Perhaps you would rather learn more about household sewing with home dressmaking.

Or a little old fashioned cookery or how to knit socks and/or stockings.

But how do such practices help to improve political situations, if at all?

What do you know about improvisations in relation to improvements, whether in kitchens or gardens or governments?

Are you seeking to learn or improve your skills in one or more crafts mainly for therapeutic purposes?

Perhaps you mostly associate improvements with progress.

What have you been learning about progress through the history of knitting and knitted fabric?

Perhaps you have been learning about the Wheel of Fortune and/or the Danse Macabre whilst following 1940s knitting patterns or otherwise occupying your hands resourcefully.

What have you been learning about luck and the ship of fools?

What do you already know about the history of hand knitting?

What have you discovered about regional variations in knitting and other practices, including political ones?

How do you tell the difference between the purely practical, the purely decorative and the possibly superstitious?

What have you discovered about blind love and blind fear?

What do you know about charmstones and the brooch of Lorn?

How have you been comparing one interpretation of the fates with another?

What do you know about Highland Mary and her fate?

What have you been learning from the past of relevance to the present, and how?

What do you know about complementary currencies and complementary medicines?

Perhaps you usually associate currencies with coins and banknotes. 

Perhaps you usually associate medicines with pills and potions, and dangers.

You may not usually associate currencies with charm bracelets, charivari jewellery and coin charms from various Asian countries. 

What do you know about 'good luck' coins in various cultures?

What do you know about historical Chinese cash coins? 

What do you know about Taoist coin charms and Fulu?

There continue to be apotropaic practices in many cultures around the world, but why?

What do you know about spirit tablets?

What do you know about Confucian coin charms?

How have you compared the concept of money in various cultures?

What do you know about Buddhist coin charms? 

What do you know about Thai Buddha amulets and Vietnamese numismatic charms and Indonesian numismatic charms and Korean numismatic charms and Japanese numismatic charms and Chinese numismatic charms?

What do you know about Chinese coin-swords and Indonesian cash coins?

Perhaps you mostly associate charm and charms with superficial charm and/or manipulative charisma. 

If you are planning to improve the world, do you believe the process requires at least one incantation?

What do you know about exonumia?

What do you know about Leigong?

What do you know about Monopoly money and other play money?

What do you know about token money, token coins and digital access tokens?

What do you know about Australian currency lads and lassies?

What have you been learning about investing money in particular locations?

What do you know about playing cards, including Chinese playing cards and the Latin Suit of Coins?

What do you know about classical elements?

What do you know about insights and delusions? 

What do you know about cognitive dissonance?

How do you attempt to cope when reality clashes with your values, and even your expectations?

What do you know about the endowment effect and loss aversion and the mere ownership effect and sunk costs and the planning fallacy and the Dunning-Kruger effect and the omission bias?

What do you know about collective identity, the status quo bias, belief perseverance, wishful thinking and the escalation of commitment towards ridiculousness and possibly even tragedy, regardless of warning signs?

What do you know about anti-patterns?

What do you know about paradigms?

What do you know about poverty in relation to work, and hope, and fate?

Do you actively advocate plain living and high thinking, for people of any socioeconomic status, rather than excessive plane travel and highly wasteful living? 

What is your global plan at present, and how did you acquire it?

You may not associate knitting with the tropics.

You may not associate superstition with responsibility.

You may associate wool with moths, and shrinking in the wash. 

What do you know about clothes moths?

What do you know about the dimensional stability of fabrics?

What do you know about the dimensional stability of societies?