We Can Plan for Mars but Not for Peace? The Double Standard in How We Use Our Intention

We have actual plans to send people to Mars.

We are actively developing timelines, technologies, and theoretical frameworks for moving human beings to another planet. Serious people devote careers to it. Governments and private companies fund it. Nobody calls it utopian thinking and dismisses it.

Meanwhile, the idea of building a society where domestic violence is structurally unthinkable – where the architecture of how we raise children, form relationships, and process conflict makes it almost impossible to arrive at that outcome – is treated as wishful idealism. Too soft. Too slow. Too vague.

That double standard tells us something important about where we have placed our effort, and where we have quietly decided not to go.

I was watching a music video recently. The subject was domestic violence. It was graphic and deeply uncomfortable – deliberately so, because it was made by people who understand that some truths need to be delivered at full force. I respect that. The ability to look directly at the ugliness of what humans do to each other, rather than looking away, is a kind of necessary courage.

But I kept noticing something in myself afterward. That tight, unsettled feeling the video leaves you with – what is it actually for? Where does it go?

In my own life, catching sight of a problem has always been the beginning, not the destination. The recognition itself is maybe 10% of the journey. What follows – working through the pain of that recognition, finding the different path, and then actually walking it over time – that is the other 90%. The part that is slower, less dramatic, and produces nothing that would make a compelling three-minute video. It is also the part where everything real happens.

I think we are collectively living inside that first 10%, and calling it progress.

This is not a dismissal of awareness. Visibility matters. Naming harm matters. The fact that we talk openly about domestic violence, about trauma, about cycles of abuse – this is not nothing. A generation ago we talked about far less. But naming is not solving, and somewhere in the volume of the naming, the solving has gotten drowned out.

What would it mean to take violence seriously as something that can be made obsolete?

Not controlled. Not minimized through better prosecution and improved shelters, though both of those things are necessary right now. But actually obsolete – in the way that relieving yourself in a public city street is obsolete. It was once normal. It is no longer. The shift happened through infrastructure, through shifting norms, through what became collectively unthinkable rather than individually resisted. Nobody exercises willpower to avoid it in a modern city. The idea simply does not arrive.

Violence could work the same way. It might take generations. But so does going to Mars.

The question we almost never ask is the upstream one: how do we build relationships? What are we actually teaching children, by the way we speak to them and to each other in front of them, about where their worth comes from and what they are owed? Are we building people who believe their wellbeing requires taking something from someone else? Or are we building people who can tend to their own internal landscape and choose connection from fullness rather than from need?

Nobody is born wanting to hurt people. That impulse is cultivated, slowly, through accumulated experience – through the unmet need that wasn't witnessed, the anger that had nowhere safe to go, the lesson learned early that the only power you have is the power to make someone else hurt the way you hurt. These are not mysteries. They are patterns we understand and could interrupt, if we decided that interrupting them was as serious a project as landing rovers on other planets.

I have done this work in my own life. I know what it looks like to trace something back to its beginning, to find the smaller and smaller antecedent, until you reach the seed – and then to give that seed a different name and something else to grow toward. It is not instantaneous. It does not make for good content. But it changes things, durably, at the root.

The music video did its job. It made me feel the weight of something real. Now I want the culture that made it to take the next step – to spend the same creative and emotional energy on the question of how we never need to make it again.

That's not utopia. That's a direction. And directions are where everything starts.