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Key points
- "Long termism" is a philosophical concept encouraging a view of life in the context of a larger timespan.
- Long-term thinking can help relieve pressure on our most vexing problems in business, politics, and media.
- Better yet, taking the long view can also enable us to live more fully in the present moment, an author says.
Short-term thinking is all around us.
Politicians vote on bills solely to win the next election. Business leaders make decisions to optimize quarterly earnings reports. News producers program the anxiety-inducing stories that keep you hooked on the 24-hour news cycle. Changing how we view time could be key to navigating many of today’s most pressing challenges.
We can step out from the present as a society, learning from cultures that take a long view of history. In one version, we can strive toward being “good ancestors,” building a world that those born many generations hence can enjoy.
Richard Fisher, a senior journalist for the BBC, mines the many forms of "long termism," traversing time and space in his new book, The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time.
He argues that the long view can be restorative, more democratic, and an engine of hope.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Prior: What do you mean when you say the long view is restorative?
Richard Fisher: The book started for me wrestling with the challenge of the moment that we live in a time of short-term thinking where politics is continually in upheaval, where climate change is happening, and where there are all sorts of threats on the horizon, like artificial intelligence, nuclear war and so on. I've always found a deep time perspective to be something that allows me to step out of the present moment.
I did a geology degree back in my undergraduate days. Picking up a rock and thinking about the very long arc of time that we all sit on, how we pass the baton between the previous generation and the next, I find that it doesn't deplete me as a thought in the way that other things that happen in the world deplete me. I believe taking the long view can restore a sense of energy and a sense of meaning when we navigate living in the present.
RP: How has studying long-term thinking changed your view of your role as a father for your young daughter, Grace?
RF: The personal approach to the long view is something that I wanted to explore in detail throughout the book. It was the starting point for me in many ways. The book opens in the hospital where Grace has been born. My sense of time is completely focused on the moment. Her birth was a very stressful period. But my sense of time started to open up as I reflected on the fact that Grace will live for hopefully a long life and she could even see the next century. And that thought I find to be very inspiring.
My daughter, I realized, is a bridge to the future. Sometimes, when we think about the world beyond 2100, it seems very far away. But now there’s someone in my house, in my family, who is a citizen of the next century. There are more than 100 million more of these 22nd-century people born every year, so the sense that we can connect with the past and the future through future generations is important to me. It's a route to thinking about the rather abstract understanding of the long view.
RP: You argue that the long view is more “democratic.” How so?
RF: When we talk about the long-term future, that shouldn't be just a small group of people doing that. Different points of view on the long view can enlighten the past, present, or future in different ways.
If you look around the world, you can find within different cultures, approaches to the long view that are quite different to the mathematical, philosophical western point of view. There's the seventh-generation principle in Native American thinking, for example. It's probably best known as the idea that we should make decisions that affect the next seven generations positively, but there are different ways of interpreting it. Some Native American scholars argue that it's best thought of as being symmetrical: three generations ahead of us, three generations behind, you're the one in the middle.
That's a variant of the “good ancestor” principle, which was coined by Jonas Salk in the 20th century, arguing that we should seek to be good ancestors, we don't own the present. We just temporarily borrow it and pass it on to our future generations.
RP: Much of the 24/7 news cycle is negatively framed. How might the long view lead to a healthier media diet?
RF: As journalists, we are encouraged to focus on what's happening right now. But in my work as a writer and editor, I now seek to take a longer view: an approach I call “long journalism.” For example, on BBC Future I ran a series called Deep Civilization that was long views on various different topics.
It's possible to expand the concept of what journalism can mean, to be more than just “news.” I'm not sad that the influence of social media is waning for news organizations, because it has fostered "short-termist" norms, like commissioning more stories that make people angry, outraged, and more likely to tweet. It's forcing these organizations to think more carefully about how to reach audiences.
Hopefully, the incentives will change for journalists. That's an optimistic point of view.
RP: Lastly, you argue that the long view is an engine for hope.
RF: To go back to the start of the book, it was about my relationship with my daughter. She for me is a source of hope. I see how she sees the world. And then I think about her and her generation continuing forward to the next century. That's a source of hope for me, thinking about how our family relationships extend ahead, that they're going to be making the decisions. It won't necessarily be the aging politicians. Time passes and new people emerge, and for me, that sense that we live in a continually changing, evolving society is hopeful because it suggests that change is possible.
