The Tyranny of the Present

Modern life dramatically overemphasizes short-term, or even immediate, gain. Politicians operate based on the next news cycle, or maybe the next election, at most. Publicly traded corporations optimize for the next quarter, and maybe the next year. Kids optimize for even shorter horizons, measured in seconds, let alone days or weeks.

Many ancient societies understood that their choices today could have consequences for generations to come. While they had fewer tools to combat the elements, in a certain sense, things were more stable. Technology and business weren’t changing the landscape constantly. There could be a landslide, earthquake, tornado or volcanic eruption that violently changed your life, unpredictably. But you would account for that the best you could, and assume otherwise that hunting, farming, raising a family – these were a given, not a huge question mark. Today, across the board, we have little regard for the future. Everything we do in both social and economic settings seems to be motivated by immediate gratification. This is not an accident, but rather the natural consequence of economic and technological systems evolving to reward speed, scale, and (especially superficial) engagement.

It is worth describing a long-term perspective from the Iroquois known as the seven generation principle, which emphasizes that decisions made today should account for seven generations into the future. This principle urges sustainability, conservation, and stewardship. And these decisions were somewhat easier to map to the future. If a local council was debating whether to allow more fishing in the local stream, its decision would directly impact the outcome for that stream and the community around it.

Today, agency has been dramatically changed: we vote for someone for whom getting our votes has the goal of personal gain. There is little or no accountability to follow through on their campaign promises. And, behold, they do not follow through. The candidate is just trying to win the election. Like a great many American voters, I am personally exasperated, trying to affect change in an indirect, and obviously ineffective way. Does this not set us up for failure? Why would we not end up with exactly what we have now – low voter participation, low voter education, and a lot of apathy?

It has been said that water flows downhill, and it is wise to remember that we are mostly water. We tend to follow the path of least resistance, especially when there are bumps (or, uncertainties) along the way. It’s not a weakness, it’s our nature. We love incentives—they drive our innate programming, the same way that they did for Pavlov’s dogs—and the sooner the better. And as our cognitive capacities have grown, leaving behind our wisdom, we have created and subjected ourselves to systems that encode our longer-term worst interest. We have engineered a civilization that offers rewards for immediate success, while ignoring longer-term ramifications.

As such, the economic aspects of short-termism have been, perhaps, the most consequential. The US stock market, by far the largest and most important economic force in the world, rewards short-term thinking in a deeply structural way. CEOs are largely compensated on this year’s performance, without regard to the sustainability of future performance. Stock prices fluctuate largely as a function of the coming quarter’s financial performance and guidance for the coming year or so. But even more importantly, investors demand not just profit, and not just profit growth, but accelerating profit growth.

Think about starting a family business. If it makes a profit, that’s great, that was the goal. Now imagine putting in place a system of rewards and punishments for succeeding or failing to grow profits year after year. You would have to constantly search for ways to grow revenue or cut costs. That can be motivating and prevent complacency—not in itself a bad thing. But now add in another system of rewards and punishments that incentivize you to grow profits faster this year than the year before. At this point, you are likely to have to abandon any sense of right or wrong, any sense of ethics or morals, and simply pursue, by any means necessary, a path to accelerating profit growth.

And in fact, a CEO who fails to operate in accordance with this mandate is likely to be fired by the Board, whose job it is to look after shareholders’ interests. The shareholders, for their part, just care about the stock price going up, not just in the long run, but more or less now. It is a system that is devouring natural resources (think of clear-cutting of the Amazon, or the dumping of chemicals into waterways) and eroding human rights (think of sweat shops and forced labor on fishing vessels) in alarming ways.

By contrast, ancient cultures shared stories and rituals to encode longer-term thinking. Modern culture, under the guise of progress, has thrown out thousands of years of learned wisdom in favor of speed, disruption, and immediate gain. Longer-term thinking is considered (and, without any mitigating factors, actually is) the weaker position. If someone is willing to do a terrible thing to win today and prevent you from winning tomorrow, shouldn’t you try to win today, even if that means doing something worse?

I find it deeply ironic that American culture, which is the poster child for short-termism, was originally based on something much wiser and longer-term minded. In 1988, The American Senate passed a resolution honoring the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and its “Great Law of Peace,” which was formed in 1142.³ It was recognized for being a significant source of inspiration for the American Constitution and its form of democracy, having heavily influenced founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Contrasting this to today’s government, which can barely pass a budget to keep the government open for the next few months, or whose elected representatives are primarily concerned with the current news cycle and maybe only as far in the future as the next election.

It is well documented that social media, here too, has made its unfortunate mark, having driven down attention spans and encouraged constant entertainment. And this is consequential. For example, a drive for immediate gratification on social media has led to a behavior, termed Social Media Self-Control Failure, which is associated with increased stress, anxiety and depression.⁴ Other studies have found that frequent exposure to short video reels, such as those found on TikTok, were associated with reduced attention spans and lower academic achievement⁵ and impaired memory.⁶ A UC Berkeley study showed that the average attention span of a child while using a screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds recently.⁷ It is, perhaps, telling that a common (self-aware and self-deprecating) descriptor among young people today of their own generation is “brain rot”.

And so, humans have become very short-term minded. We do not think years ahead, let alone generations. And yet, the primary inspiration for the most important democracy in the world was one which embodied a seven-generation horizon. We no longer consider what kind of ancestors we’re being, only what returns we’re getting, right now.