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29 December 2024
Let's say every year you go on a two week vacation costing $2500. You fly to Bali, Acapulco, Ireland, or some other notable place, and spend money on hotels, sight-seeing, food, entertainment (and perhaps bribes and medical care...). (From easily accessed, possibly rough, estimates of costs I saw online, $2500 is somewhere in the middle of the cost of the three destinations mentioned. Bali was maybe $1800 to $2500 flying from San Diego, the other two were somewhere in the $3000s range.)
If you donate something like $5000 to effective anti-malaria charities, such as Against Malaria Foundation, you will prevent someone from dying from malaria. (GiveWell recently has given lower numbers, but the cost is likely to go up over time, for those reading this in the future.) This person, on average, will be the average age for their country, and on average will live to life expectancy (average age at death) for their country. Perhaps the average age is 30, and life expectancy is 60. Then, this person whose life you would have saved would live an extra 30 years. In these 30 years, they can support their family, otherwise contribute to their nation's economy and social life, and have an extra 30 years to overcome their sins.
If you skip your $2500 vacation, the money you save can be given to AMF, and purchase, in effect, half of a life saved (half of $5000). So, 15 years of life, in the example given above.
Does your two weeks of relaxation, family bonding, and fun compare to 15 years of someone else's life? Maybe you could say that the other 50 weeks of the year, you grind yourself hard, and you couldn't continue without a vacation good enough to restore you. If someone tells you to skip your vacation, which you've been waiting for all year, which is only three weeks away, you think "How could I survive without my vacation? There's no way I could skip it, even to enable someone else to live another 15 years". You may not be able to get refunds that close to the travel date, and even if you could, it might be too much to bear.
Arguably, your vacation is necessary for you to keep your job, and your job is where you got the $2500 to spend in the first place. But what is really necessary in a vacation? Currently, you have to have some really exciting and novel sights, sounds, and other sensations to make it worthwhile. That's why you have go to places like Bali, Acapulco, or Ireland. But what if you could derive enough relaxation from time spent not working, spent in your own city, or a nearby one, or a nearby nature preserve? Perhaps mix time in more home-like settings with more "travel-like" ones.
Limiting your budget limits your options a lot, and you could run out of novelty doing this regularly. But it's still a change of pace from your job. There are people who can't afford to travel, some of whom have stressful jobs, who manage to keep their jobs. Somehow humans can live without the kind of novelty that comes from trips to far-away places. But it might take time to adjust.
Some of the adjustment comes from retraining your brain, and some from realigning your heart, your values. If you value novelty a lot, it will tend to be something you crave and are emotionally attached to. Maybe after your next vacation, you could plan to try to work on how your mind works so that you are not as emotionally invested in novelty, and your brain doesn't need it as much, that way you can save a lot of money on the following vacation, and donate the difference to helping someone live as many as 15 more years. Perhaps you can become used to the idea of someone living longer, and understand how that is valuable, so that that becomes emotionally rewarding.
(Perhaps part of the desire to travel is the fear that you will never get to see some place you have begun to be attached to just by hearing about it or seeing pictures of it. Are you afraid that you won't make it to heaven, where you will get to see it as often as you need to?)
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Are you a good person or a bad person? Some people have bad intentions and don't care that they do. While they might have redeeming qualities that make them somewhat valuable or appealing, the fact that they have bad intentions and don't care clearly marks them as people that God can't have with him in eternity, unless they repent.
Other people think that they are basically good people, but their consciences bother them over something that they continue to be. They may believe that they are not in the right, but they try to suppress that thought rather than do the right thing (or become the right kind of person). If you know that you're not right and you try to suppress that knowledge, you might feel like you are a basically good person sometimes. But having suppressed your conscience, you are knowingly-enough being bad. So it is also clear that God can't have you with him in eternity, unless you repent.
Generally speaking, God values 15 years of someone's life more than another person's two week vacation. You can have a clean conscience and with no conscious bad intentions go on your $2500 annual vacation, particularly if you've never thought about the question before, and passed over the many hints that the world is a place of poverty that you can help with, not willfully ignoring, but simply not being aware of them. But your values will not be the same as God's. If they were, you would have been searching out for ways to help the people who get malaria, or people like them. You will not have God's heart, and you will not be giving yourself completely to what's right (to him). So similarly, God can't have you with him in eternity, unless you repent.
If you are someone with purely good intentions, but you have not developed the heart of God, at the end of the Millennium, God will ask you whether you really want to be with him, at the expense of all your sins. If your heart still loves sins, it's like the situation when someone told you about the Against Malaria Foundation three weeks before your $2500 vacation. You may not have time to change your values so that they are those of God. But if your heart does not love sins, it's the situation where you work on your brain and heart over the course of a year so that a vacation spent at home, or some place inexpensive if home isn't good enough, did become possible as a way to restore your ability to keep working your job. Then you already want what God wants and it's easy to say yes to him, in all he really is.
With a heroic effort, you might be able to not go on your vacation, only three weeks away, expected all year. And so some people may be able to say yes to God anyway, at the end of the Millennium, without complete preparation. But it is safer, and less stressful in the end, to prepare in the long years of this life and in the Millennium.