What’s in it for me? Cultivate long-term thinking to prepare for the future.
Long-term thinking is one of humanity’s most precious abilities – in fact, it’s what makes civilization possible, from planning architecture to cultures and systems.
And yet, we witness shortsighted decisions every day in our personal lives, in our communities, and in society.
Whether it’s saving for retirement or preparing communities for global climate change, long-term planning presents a fundamental dilemma: to do what’s better for tomorrow, instead of what’s easy today.
In these blinks, you’ll learn about the barriers that stand in the way of wise judgment and how to cultivate a mindset to overcome them.
You’ll also learn how decision-makers in society can improve their ability to weigh future losses and opportunities to benefit generations to come.
Equipped with these practical strategies, you’ll discover that reckless decision-making is not humanity’s fate, but a choice that anyone can refuse to take.
People and societies are not doomed to make short-sighted decisions.
In these blinks, you’ll learn the surprising trick to convince young people to save for retirement; why a successful hedge fund investor hides her portfolio from herself; and what lobstermen in Mexico can teach global markets about adapting to climate change.
Imagine you’re at the supermarket, shopping for groceries with the best of intentions.
You fill your cart with fruits and vegetables, and glide to the cashier, hopped up on your own wholesome goodness.
But when you arrive at the register, you find yourself surrounded by a sea of chocolate bars.
Your doctor has strictly warned you to avoid sugar but, with the colorful packages winking at you while you wait in line, you can already taste the sinful sweetness on your tongue.
At the last minute, you cave and grab a couple off the shelf.
You know that “the future you” might regret this impulse – but right now, you want the treats.
The key message here is: People and societies are not doomed to make short-sighted decisions.
Reckless decisions are made when we consciously ignore the future threats and opportunities that we can foresee.
And we witness people making short-sighted decisions every day.
More concerning than our personal missteps are the reckless decisions we make in society.
For example, the global 2014 Ebola epidemic and the 2007 economic crisis were both more devastating than they needed to be because reliable predictions about them went ignored.
Or consider that every day, doctors prescribe painkillers to soothe patients, which all too often leads them to opioid addiction.
We as a species have a collective tendency to kick the can down the road when it comes to our most pressing problems – just think about how our political systems fail to act on our global climate crisis, even though it threatens humanity’s existence.
With so many failures of judgment, it would be easy to conclude that humans are fundamentally reckless.
But recklessness, the author argues, is not a fixed human trait.
In fact, this fatalist myth is just what makes people feel powerless in the face of future change.
Rather, the author calls our modern era “a reckless age” because the stakes have never been higher for humanity to think ahead about its survival in the face of rising seas and planet overheating.
At the same time, we have unprecedented tools to detect the warning signs of disaster.
We can see how the legacy of our current choices will pan out tomorrow, whether it’s how saving money improves retirement conditions, or how burning fossil fuels today devastates tomorrow’s natural habitats.
Luckily, wise decision-making is a skill that can be developed.
We can all learn to make good judgments about the future, both on a collective and on an individual scale.
In the following blinks, we’ll look at the conditions that prevent people from thinking ahead – and the tools we can hone to correct them.
Culture and values drastically influence people’s relationship to their immediate impulses.
Every payday, it's easy to get excited about the influx of money in your bank account.
You know you should save it for retirement, but wouldn't that new jacket in the shop window make a spectacular addition to your wardrobe?
It’s the sort of dilemma we face each day: we know the long-term benefits of delaying gratification, but too often we fall into the clutches of immediate temptation.
Here’s the key message: Culture and values drastically influence people’s relationship to their immediate impulses.
One of the most popular experiments to study temptation is the infamous marshmallow test, first conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s to assess delayed gratification in children.
He gave 600 children a choice: you can gobble up one of your favorite treats – for example, a marshmallow – straight away, or wait for up to 20 minutes for a bigger payoff of two treats.
Decades later, Mischel discovered that the same kids who delayed gratification later achieved superior SAT scores and more advanced degrees.
His findings suggest that delaying gratification was a trait in but a few naturally gifted children.
The more popular the test became, the more people came to see children’s “passing” – or not – as a quintessential metric of innate ability.
But Mischel’s research was missing an important factor.
Indeed, marshmallow test studies in other parts of the world would later contest Mischel’s conclusions.
In 2017, psychologist Bettina Lamm took the marshmallow test from Germany to a subsistence farming community in Cameroon.
She found that the nearly 200 Cameroonian children “passed” at dramatically higher rates than their German counterparts – with 70% waiting half an hour for their preferred treats, compared to less than 30% of middle-class German kids in a previous study.
Lamm could not provide a definitive reason for the Cameroonian children’s tendency to wait.
But she did observe that they were being raised with different expectations: for example, mothers expected respect from their children and did not seek the children’s signals of need as often as German mothers.
Lamm’s findings – and several other marshmallow tests that followed – suggest that we can create conditions for delaying gratification by changing our customs and ways of life.
In other words, we have to learn the cultural practices and norms that make thinking ahead possible.
The real question is, what ways of living and thinking are conducive to developing foresight?
The threats people take seriously are the ones they can vividly imagine.
Imagine yourself in the future at an event you’re looking forward to, like walking down the aisle on your graduation day.
If you try, you can probably summon the sights and colors.
Maybe you can even hear the din of the crowd and feel the certificate in your palm.
Although the event hasn’t happened yet, you are able to conjure all the sensory details of the moment.
If you’ve ever found yourself daydreaming about a future version of yourself, you were engaging in what cognitive scientists call mental time travel.
Your mind repurposes images from your memory to bring a future event to life.
And without this ability to imagine the future, human civilization would not exist: there would be no planning, no architecture, no culture.
The key message here is: The threats people take seriously are the ones they can vividly imagine.
Our minds tend to wander to the future when we look forward to an event.
On the other hand, when we feel anxious about what we foresee – like the thought of doing taxes or rising sea levels – most of us prefer to look away.
For instance, we all know we are aging but it can be hard to inhabit the daily reality of old age, which is why so many fail to financially prepare for retirement.
In 2011, economist Hal Hershfield wanted to test if visualizing oneself as elderly would encourage young people to save for retirement.
So he created a virtual reality program, assigning some subjects computer-generated avatars of themselves with physical features of old age – wrinkles, receding hairline and all.
Other subjects were only assigned avatars of other elderly people.
Hershfield later found that all students who encountered themselves as elderly in the experiment were later more willing to save money for the future than those who didn’t.
But sharpening our imagination doesn’t necessitate sophisticated technology.
We can easily brainstorm future scenarios to reflect on present decisions.
Two students who wanted to raise awareness about the long-term impact of climate change demonstrated this in the 2015 DearTomorrow project.
They invited people to write letters to their future selves or relatives – to be opened 50 years in the future.
In a simple way, the project transformed abstract future concerns into an immediately conceivable scenario.
As these studies indicate, the more vividly we can imagine our future selves, the better we can measure the long-term impact of our current choices.
That’s why it’s so important to stoke the imagination in the face of immediate urges.
Planning your reaction to future temptations can help you hone willpower.
Every day, our senses are bombarded with temptations to do what’s better for now, versus tomorrow.
When you smell a cookie at the bakery or see a shiny lottery ticket at the supermarket, an overwhelming urge makes it hard to conceive future consequences – even if in the absence of those immediate temptations, you wouldn’t settle for a quick fix.
The question is, how can we hone willpower for long-term gains in the face of so much immediate temptation?
Here’s the key message: Planning your reaction to future temptations can help you hone willpower.
Peter Gollwitzer, a professor of experimental psychology at NYU, conducted hundreds of studies about how people can stick to their long-term goals in the face of immediate urges.
His research – which covered everything from eating better to completing homework assignments to saving money – found that most people don’t lack motivation to stick to goals.
They just find it difficult to stay on track when confronted with their short-term urges.
Gollwitzer also concluded that people who anticipate obstacles are more likely to resist them when they arise.
For example, people who want to avoid junk food might jot down every possible temptation they’ll face in a week, and then set up a plan to reject them.
This is what the author calls the if/then ritual.
If/then asks you to actually imagine yourself taking a given action in the future, rather than just the scenario.
What’s surprising about Gollwitzer’s research on if/then techniques is that it reveals that the more difficult the long-term goal, the greater the power of the tactic.
It works better, in other words, for the challenges that require the most willpower.
The power of if/then rituals can also extend to the lives of others.
For example, University of Oregon professor Kent McIntosh trains high school teachers to practice if/then to avoid over-disciplining students.
During training, teachers state recurring obstacles and plan their reaction to them, for example: “If a student speaks out of turn, I will drop a pencil and take a deep breath before deciding what to do.
” When the moment comes, they find they are able to stick to the script.
In this way, imagining our obstacles is more effective than sugar-coating them to avoid immediate discomfort.
We can use these hindsight practices not only as individuals, but also as a society, to face scary scenarios and find opportunities within them.
Focusing on short-term metrics obscures the big picture about the future.
Let’s say you want to become fitter, so you set the goal to run half-a-mile a day for a month.
Weeks later, your running app dings – hooray, you’ve reached your goal!
But when you step on the scale that day, you notice you’ve gained more than a few pounds.
You cringe as you remember that you stopped off for ice cream after every other jog – which your running app didn’t measure.
The key message here is: Focusing on short-term metrics obscures the big picture about the future.
When you set a goal-oriented metric – like tracking your steps when you want to become fitter – it’s because you trust it to be a marker of progress.
The issue is that focusing on a single data point doesn’t take other factors, like your daily sugar intake, into account.
To get the full picture, you need to focus on more than a single data point.
A cab driver, for example, would get a better idea of business when measuring annual income instead of daily earnings.
After all, it’s logical enough that various data points, observed over longer periods of time, will be less myopic.
So why do we buy into short-term metrics?
Sociologist Daniel Kahneman argues that our tendency to set close-range goals comes down to our evolutionary aversion to loss, since our hunter-gatherer ancestors responded to immediate threats for survival.
The modern human thus inherited this tendency to protect herself at all costs from short-term losses.
In practice, however, focusing on incremental loss can obscure long-term threats and opportunities.
Economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean showed how investors sell off stocks that outperform the market as soon as there is a temporary dip in value – even when those very stocks will be more valuable over time.
To overcome this tendency, you need to master the art of tuning out the “noise” of close-range losses.
One hedge fund investor avoided overreacting to loss by ordering her employees to hide her portfolio until stocks crossed a certain threshold, which ended up benefiting her financially.
You can also adopt this practice.
If, for example, you’re buying a home, focus less on the cost of near-term payments, and more on expenses over the decades you expect to live there.
In the end, focusing on losses can only take you so far in the quest for foresight.
But what about sweetening the deal with rewards?
People need immediate rewards for making long-term sacrifices.
When a friend of the author’s decided to run a marathon, she went along to cheer him on.
She knew her friend had a festive spirit, so she decided to surprise him at key mile markers by scattering glitter all over him.
After completing the race, her friend came to thank her – the glitter had provided him with the boost he needed to endure until the end.
This is what the author terms the glitter tactic – offering rewards for going the extra mile – and it can go a long way when it comes to thinking ahead.
Here’s the key message: People need immediate rewards for making long-term sacrifices.
The fundamental idea behind the glitter tactic is that we can motivate ourselves today to do something that’s good for our future selves, even if in the moment it’s not as pleasant.
It’s not much different from giving a child a balloon for enduring the discomfort at a dentist’s office which, in turn, will prevent future cavities.
While it’s a simple approach, the glitter tactic can be used effectively to help people in desperation.
For example, many who reside in hazardous hurricane zones in the United States ignore evacuation warnings, at their own peril.
What seems like a short-sighted decision is made out of desperation – people refuse to abandon their homes because insurance is unaffordable, while relief funds provided by the government to those who are stranded are significant.
In this way, people are cornered into risking their lives.
But it doesn’t have to be this way: in Houston and New Jersey, for example, the government offers generous buyouts for people to leave their homes after disasters – with huge success rates that prove the power of the glitter tactic.
The glitter approach can also be effective in encouraging climate action.
Most calls for people and businesses to reduce carbon emissions go unheeded because they offer no immediate rewards.
More recently, to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint, groups have suggested taking the glitter approach by offering people tax credits for reducing car pollution, or mailing them quarterly dividend checks.
It’s easy to see how an approach that addresses immediate wins could make policies attractive to more people in the short term.
But in the end, honing foresight is about looking beyond personal gains.
The key to foresight is to see yourself – and your actions – as part of a greater history.
Maybe you have a treasured family heirloom – a great-grandmother’s wedding ring, or a grandfather’s lucky charm.
These items are meaningful because they represent a continuum of history.
Passed down from generation to generation, heirlooms turn you into an ancestor with the responsibility of passing it down to your descendants.
This is what spurs you to protect your heirloom, so it may outlive you.
The key message here is: The key to foresight is to see yourself – and your actions – as part of a greater history.
Similarly, when communities think of a resource as a shared heirloom, it encourages them to protect it.
Cultural heritage sights are a good example: we continue to protect the pyramids of Egypt or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because they tie the past and present to the future.
But with climate change, natural heritage is disappearing.
The global food industry is notorious for depleting natural resources which are critical to the diets and ecosystems of millions.
In a bid for immediate profit, they deprive future generations of the means they need to survive.
But many fail to imagine an alternative to blind profit – one exception being a group of lobstermen from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.
Spread across nine villages, the lobstermen were first prompted to change their hunter-gatherer ways of catching lobster in the 1980s, when turbulent El Niño weather concerned local elders about the future of their community's livelihood.
Since fishing was the only viable economic activity around, they understood that protecting the future of the lobster catch would be essential for the future of their grandchildren.
And so they developed a system of fishing that ensured gain without encouraging blind profit: they farm the sea by setting traps on the seafloor, color-coded by village.
During the catch, they methodically leave behind large lobsters that could be good breeding stock and small lobsters that have yet to grow.
Finally, an independent federation divides the catch among the villages to ensure fairness.
As a result, the lobster population in the Baja Peninsula is still thriving today – even while they face mass extinction in the neighboring reefs.
There’s a valuable lesson here that we can all learn: we can choose to consider how our current actions can benefit hundreds of generations to come, rather than just the next few, if we think of our resources and values as shared heirlooms.
At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves more often: How can I be a good ancestor?
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: The ability to think ahead is what distinguishes being human.
And yet, we witness how short-sighted decisions cause problems every day, in personal life and in the world.
To overcome these, we need to cultivate a way of thinking and living that overlooks immediate urges and short-term losses, for the benefit of our future selves and generations to follow.
Actionable advice: Set a special time aside to reflect on your progress.
It’s tempting to make rash judgments when we have so many ways of measuring where we stand in real-time.
To address this, try integrating a ritual of reflection into your life.
Make a list of targets and schedule a specific time, once or twice a month, to review your progress.
It’s a way of protecting yourself from obsessing – and impulsive reacting – to immediate losses and gains, for the sake of long-term results.
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What to read next: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World, by Jim Brumm In these blinks, we covered how we can practice strategies towards honing foresight in our lives and in the world, for the good of our future selves and societies.
But how can we get to the root of how our own short-sightedness fits in the big picture of a global challenge like climate change?
Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World (2012) elaborates on how crucial long-term thinking is in today's world and how we can take more responsible actions today to ensure safer long-term consequences.