Infinitely variable, yet some aspects are considered more important than others.
You need to do X. You need to do Y. You must complete Z. You must not say A to D; you must say A to B; D is always with B.
Life happens all at once. It doesn’t fall into neat order. To get through, a person has to make decisions – even if the decision is to multitask and do everything at once.
People will define priorities, and those priorities will make the decisions easier.
Money. Family. Health. Job. Professional reputation. Being good. Getting shit done. Quantity, quality. Sex. Drugs. Music. Food. Water. Multitask. Precision. Validation. Fix it later.
In the US, making sure you have clean water every day is not a standard priority. It doesn’t generally hit the scale. In subsaharan Africa, water – let alone clean water – could be so important as to derail any other priorities until it’s solved.
Whatever hits perception (itself fundamentally iffy) gets weighed and compared. As it’s prioritization leads to more success, it’s level becomes less fluid and more stable, even brittle.
But what doesn’t go away: we’re setting priorities. Constantly. Re-wrangling them into sense, modeling against various exigencies, sometimes even always ensuring some goal is at the top (like family, or money, or relieving and impending sense of doom) even if it has nothing to directly contribute to a particular situation.
Springboards
1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water – UNICEF, WHO. (2019, June 18). Who.int.
Drinking-water. (2023, September 13). Who.int.
Hannah Ritchie, Fiona Spooner, and Max Roser (2019) - “Clean Water” Published online at OurWorldinData.org.
Hope, R. (2024). Four billion people lack safe water. Science (New York, N.Y.), 385(6710), 708–709.
Kennedy, L. (2019, October 4). Troubled Water episode, Rotten. Netflix.
Kingsland, J. (2021, April 22). How water poverty impacts public health in the US. Medical News Today.
Klobucista, C., & Robinson, K. (2023, April 3). Water stress: A global problem that’s getting worse. Council on Foreign Relations.
Renwick DV, Heinrich A, Weisman R, Arvanaghi H, Rotert K. Potential Public Health Impacts of Deteriorating Distribution System Infrastructure. J Am Water Works Assoc. 2019 Feb 4;111(2):42-53. doi: 10.1002/awwa.1235. PMID: 32280135; PMCID: PMC7147732.
US EPA, O. P. (2013). History of the Clean Water Act.
Water scarcity: Addressing the growing lack of available water to meet children’s needs. Unicef.org.