Mediaboss Marketing

Over the next 200 years, this scientific and intellectual lengthening of the time span we could imagine paved the way for great strides in our understanding of ourselves and the planet. It allowed Darwin to propose his theory of evolution, geologists to carbon-date the true age of Earth, and physicists to simulate the expansion of the universe.

Our awareness of deep time was here to stay, but thats not the same as paying attention to it. The 18th-century European contemplation of a long, bright future was not to last. Periodically, perspectives would shorten, often through crises such as the French Revolution. Hlscher argues that you can see this transformation in writing from the late 1700s into the dawn of the 1800s: optimistic, far-reaching predictions about the world gave way to more circumspect descriptions of the future, focused on next steps and nearer-term improvements in standards of living. A similar contraction, he contends, took place with World War I, following the hopeful future-gazing of the early 20th century.

According to historian Franois Hartog, the author of Regimes of Historicity, we are in the midst of another shortening right now. He argues that at some point between the late 1980s and the turn of the century, a convergence of societal trends took us into a new regime of time that he calls presentism. He defines it as the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now. In the 21st century, he writes, the future is not a radiant horizon guiding our advancing steps, but rather a line of shadow drawing closer.

On the scale of civilization, it is difficult to test empirically the assertions of those who say we are living in a short-termist age. Future historians may have a clearer view. But we can still perceive the lack of longer-term thinking from which our society suffers.

You can see short-termism in business, in populist politics, and in our collective failure to tackle long-term risks like climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, or antibiotic resistance.

You can see it in business, where quarterly reporting encourages CEOs to prioritize short-term investor satisfaction over long-term prosperity. You can see it in populist politics, where leaders are more focused on the next election and the desires of their base than the long-term health of the nation. And you can see it in our collective failure to tackle long-term risks: climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, or antibiotic resistance.

These risks make it increasingly important to extend our perspective beyond our own lifetimes; our actions are rippling further into the future than ever before. But as the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord has argued, this power to shape the future is not yet matched by foresight or wisdom.

There may be multiple forces fostering a short-termist mindset in our age. Some point to that often-blamed scourge, the internet. Others lament the intersection of 24-hour news media and politics, which encourages decision-makers to focus more on headlines or polling than future generations. Hartog blames the capitalist, consumerist norms that came to dominate Western culture by the late 20th century. During this period, technological progress kept forging ahead, and the consumer society grew and grew, he writes, and with it the category of the present, which this society targeted and, to an extent, appropriated as its particular trademark.

As with many ailments, there is probably no single cause: rather, the convergence of many is responsible. But we need not despair. If this account is correct, then short-termism is an emergent property of the cultural, economic, and technological moment. It need not last forever, nor is it totally out of our control. The assumption that things must always stay the way they are today is actually itself a form of presentism. But if we understand some of the psychological pressures that nudge us toward short-termism in daily life, we can find ways to combat them.

During a recent fellowship at MIT, I investigated how our psychological experience of the future can change. I was curious about what role the far future plays in our day-to-day lives, if any. I also wanted to know what psychological pressures might cause us to lose sight of the long term in everyday decisions. I call these pressures temporal stresses.

Some themes surfaced again and again, to which Ive given the convenient acronym SHORT:

S SalienceH HabitsO OverloadR ResponsibilityT Targets

First, salience. Striking, emotionally resonant events tend to dominate our thinking more than abstract happenings. Its a facet of the availability heuristic, a cognitive bias that means people are more likely to imagine the future through the lens of recent events.

This means that slow, creeping problems like global warming dont pop up on the attentional radar until something is burning or flooding. Before the covid-19 pandemic, even disease scientists were more focused on the salient dangers of Ebola and Zika, rather than coronaviruses.

Entrenched yet invisible habits play a role here. Its harder to overcome the shortening effects of salience when we are doomscrolling on our phones through political controversy, crime, culture wars, disasters, or attacks. These events, while important, populate our imaginings of the future to a disproportionate degree.

See original here:
Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Heres how we escape. - MIT Technology Review