Six Ways Long Term

Six Ways to Think Long-term

Overview

Roman Krznaric's "Six Ways to Think Long-term" presents a cognitive toolkit for escaping short-term thinking and becoming a "good ancestor." Published in "The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World" (2020), the framework addresses a fundamental challenge: how can we make decisions today that serve people who won't be born for generations?

The toolkit establishes 100 years as the minimum threshold for "long-term" - roughly one long human lifespan, pushing us beyond our ego boundary of personal mortality. An estimated 6.75 trillion people will be born in the next 50,000 years. This framework asks: what do we owe these "futureholders"?

Each of the six ways represents a distinct cognitive shift from our default short-term bias. Combined, they create a comprehensive approach to long-horizon decision-making applicable to climate action, institutional design, infrastructure investment, and personal legacy planning.

When to Use

• Making decisions with multi-generational consequences
• Evaluating policies affecting future populations
• Designing institutions meant to outlast their founders
• Climate action and sustainability planning
• Personal legacy and estate planning
• Infrastructure investments (energy, transportation, cities)
• Institutional governance and succession planning
• Assessing ethical obligations to future generations
• Breaking free from quarterly-thinking or election-cycle myopia

The Process

Step 1: Cultivate Deep-Time Humility

Recognize humanity's minuscule place in cosmic history. Our 200,000-year existence is an eyeblink in Earth's 4.5 billion years.

Exercise: Draw your life as a dot on a 100-meter timeline representing Earth's history. Humans appear in the final 4 millimeters; your life is invisible.

Insight: This perspective reveals both our destructive potential (we can alter planetary systems in a geological instant) and our responsibility (we're the first generation to understand our impact).

Step 2: Develop a Transcendent Legacy Mindset

Move beyond personal or familial legacy ("be remembered by my kids") to transcendent legacy ("be remembered well by generations I'll never meet").

Question: If someone 500 years from now researched your era, would they find evidence you worked for their benefit?

Models:

• Wangari Maathai: Planted 40 million trees in Kenya
• Jonas Salk: Refused to patent polio vaccine ("Could you patent the sun?")
• Katie Paterson's Future Library: 100 novels sealed until 2114

Step 3: Apply Intergenerational Justice

Recognize moral obligations to "futureholders" - future people who vastly outnumber those alive today.

Decision framework: Before major decisions, ask: "How would someone seven generations from now judge this choice?"

Application: Indigenous Iroquois Confederacy required consideration of impacts seven generations ahead (~175 years) for major decisions.

Concrete test: Does this decision create options for the future (good) or foreclose them (bad)?

Step 4: Practice Cathedral Thinking

Envision and commit to projects spanning decades or centuries, accepting you won't see completion.

Criteria for cathedral projects:

• Multi-generational timeline (50+ years to full realization)
• Benefits accrue primarily to future generations
• Requires sustained effort across leadership transitions
• Creates lasting infrastructure (physical, institutional, or knowledge)

Examples: Climate action, seed banks (Svalbard Vault), Long Now Foundation's 10,000 Year Clock, social movements (women's suffrage took 72 years in US).

Step 5: Engage in Holistic Forecasting

Map possible civilization pathways rather than single predictions:

Three trajectories:

1. Breakdown: Collapse from ecological overshoot, conflict, or systemic failure
2. Reform: Piecemeal solutions within existing paradigms (incremental improvement)
3. Transformation: Radical systemic change creating new paradigms

Application: Identify leverage points where intervention could shift trajectory from Breakdown/Reform toward Transformation. Focus effort there.

Question: What disruptions (technological, social, ecological) could redirect society's path?

Step 6: Pursue a Transcendent Goal

Adopt "one-planet thriving" as the organizing objective: humanity living within Earth's biocapacity while flourishing.

Principles:

• Harvest renewable resources only at regeneration rates
• Limit waste to what systems can absorb
• Preserve biodiversity and ecosystem function
• Ensure equitable distribution within planetary boundaries

Personal application: Calculate your ecological footprint. What would it take to live within your fair share of Earth's capacity?

Example Application

Situation: City council evaluating 50-year infrastructure bond for public transit.

Application:

• Deep-time humility: Current car-centric infrastructure is 100 years old; this decision shapes the next 100. We're not the endpoint.
• Legacy mindset: Will 2075 residents thank us or curse us? What would we want our predecessors to have built?
• Intergenerational justice: 7th generation test - does transit create options (mobility, density, climate) or foreclose them (sprawl lock-in)?
• Cathedral thinking: Accept that the full transit network takes 30+ years. Current council starts what successors finish.
• Holistic forecasting: Map pathways - breakdown (climate, congestion), reform (incremental road expansion), transformation (transit-oriented development)
• Transcendent goal: Does this investment align with one-planet thriving or perpetuate overshoot?

Outcome: Framework shifts debate from "cost/benefit in my term" to "what kind of ancestors do we want to be?"

Scoring Rubric

• Practitioner Weight: 7/10 - Krznaric is public philosopher; Long Now Foundation endorsement adds credibility
• Clarity/Executability: 8/10 - Six clear concepts with specific exercises
• ROI: 7/10 - Benefits are diffuse and long-term by design
• Novelty: 8/10 - Synthesis of long-term thinking approaches into coherent toolkit
• Cross-domain: 9/10 - Universally applicable to any long-horizon decision

Total: 39/50

Anti-Patterns

• Applying to decisions with genuinely short time horizons (not everything needs 100-year thinking)
• Using long-term framing to avoid accountability for near-term impacts
• Cathedral thinking without viable knowledge transfer mechanisms
• Paralysis from deep-time perspective ("nothing I do matters")
• Ignoring present needs for speculative future benefits
• Treating "future generations" as monolithic rather than diverse stakeholders
• Assuming we know what future people will value

Related

• cathedral-thinking (multi-generational project execution)
• 10000-year-clock (civilization-scale timeframes)
• seventh-generation-principle (Indigenous decision framework)
• backcasting (working backwards from desired futures)
• systems-thinking (understanding long-term dynamics)
• intergenerational-ethics (philosophical foundations)