Longpath

What an incredible event in Houston! Hundreds of people came together to celebrate the formation of Forward Texas and our national launch. It genuinely felt historic and it was wonderful to meet so many active and fired up volunteers and leaders from all over the country.

Between now and Election Day we will be getting out to support candidates and ballot initiatives as well as working to gain ballot access in15 states. If the people in Houston were any sign we are the team to do it!

This week on the podcast I interview futurist Ari Wallach, who wrote the book “Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, An Antidote for Short-Termism.” I’m passionate about trying to move our policies away from continuous reactivity and short-term thinking, and Ari makes a compelling case on how to move toward thinking bigger.

Ari believes we are in a period of dramatic transition that will ‘reset the defaults of how we think and operate as human beings,’ similar to the Enlightenment or the First Industrial Age. It’s a period of ‘both crazy creativity and crazy danger.’ He writes: “All around us we see that the old ways of being and doing no longer work . . . meanwhile, we also see new, positive ways of thinking, doing, behaving and organizing popping up . . . the old ways are dying hard deaths, but the new ways are still in the process of being born, and being in the in-between can sort of suck.”

Ari posits – as we all know – that short-term stresses dominate today, in part because of social media. “Our short term tendencies are getting worse . . . The rapid pace of technological development exacerbates presentism . . . [our] brains become so addicted to the dopamine rush that “ding!” offers them that it takes more and more to satisfy them. The brain is in a perpetual stance of awaiting the next hit.”

Ari’s appeal is the opposite - Longpath wants us to embrace long-term empathetic thinking that prioritizes future generations. Many will come after us, after all. “We need to focus on a vision of the future that’s very much about the humans we want to be – the pro-social intergenerational way of being and feeling in the world that we spread through our everyday actions.” Ari emphasizes individual behavior as much or more than macro change; in this way Longpath becomes something of an approach to living your life as opposed to advocating for a specific policy shift.

Ari’s stance reminds me of a talk by the writer Sebastian Junger I attended recently, where he instructed everyone to throw their smartphones in the nearest body of water. We laughed but I think he was serious.

The other big principle of Longpath is that the future is fluid, not fixed, and we should be deliberate in trying to determine not just what lies ahead but our purpose. Why do we do what we do? What is the future that we want? “The unexamined future is not worth fighting for,” Ari writes. He also says that the 'official future' that we are presented with is not something that we should accept, especially given that it tends to be more dystopian than the opposite.

I agree with that – the idea of a movement of people who are both thinking and acting with the long term in mind is just what we need to move our trajectory in a more positive direction. Ari compares this tribe of long-term thinkers to a trim tab that turns a submarine by redirecting the flow of water: “If you’re willing to go against the flow, a very small change can turn something very big around.”

I hope that Ari's book helps bring people together and get them thinking both bigger and longer-term. Let's plan on being here for a while and being positive about what's ahead. It starts with a plan.

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