When life gives you nine dozen lemons

Are we too rich to care about the future?

Recently I went to a fundraiser for a friend of mine and, not being the type to feel comfortable standing around looking dopey, I gravitated to the kitchen to see if I could help.

There I was assigned the task of making lemonade and the organiser gave me a box with what I guessed to be about nine dozen lemons, and two medium sized jugs.

I had a lemon squeezer, so all I had to do was cut each lemon in half, squeeze, and toss the left-over lemon in the bin at my feet. Which is easy and a bit fun, so off I went.

But at some point I looked down and realised that because I had so many lemons — way more than I needed to make two jugs of lemonade — I was doing a really sloppy job.

I’ve made lemonade before with a handful of lemons by squeezing every drop out of those suckers, but here, where I had so many, I just wasn’t using the same amount of care.

And it occurred to me that this might be an analogy for how we are living in the first world right now. Given nine dozen lemons, we’re just giving them a bit of a squeeze and then letting them drop away.

We live in the most luxurious time in all of human history. Even the lifestyles of kings and emperors pale in comparison to our access to things like a diverse diet, climate control, range and ease of travel and access to information. We are the spoiled little princes and princesses of our ancestors. And if any of those things are taken away, we complain long and loud about the depth of our suffering, disregarding the giddy heights we stand upon to do it.

But despite our advances and our incredible advantages, we are leaving a trail of waste and carelessness behind us. In part, I think this is because we have too much.

How much food do you throw away each week? How much hotter or colder is your air-conditioning than genuinely required? How much junk do you churn into landfill? I’m guilty on all counts, every single day, even though I am horribly conscious that places like the Great Barrier Reef here in Australia are suffering and dying because of it. We are accumulating and discarding at an increasingly devastating rate. And with that we are possibly making the future a place where our level of luxury can never exist again.

I read once that if a single person encounters another in distress, they will deliver aid almost without fail. But given the same scenario in a crowded situation, most people will assume someone else will assist, and not make moves to help. I’ve seen this myself on a train once when a young woman fainted. Everybody hesitated to help, because everyone thought someone else might step up first. In the end I helped her, because I understood why no one else would. But if I didn’t know? Maybe I would have also stood by waiting for someone else to do something.

So here is my point about lemons. I think, right now, most of us are the crowd. And we have too many lemons. We need to stop hoping that someone else out there is being less careless than us. We need to try to learn to ignore our wealth and squeeze every single lemon carefully, and maybe even gift some of our excess before it rots and wastes for everyone, forever.