- When we think about our own life,
we think about from birth to death.
We have what I call a 'Lifespan bias.'
We're the only known sentient species
that at a very early point in time,
realizes one day we're actually going to cease to exist.
Ernest Becker says though, that this is actually
the greatest challenge that homo sapiens face.
What death does is it kind of puts an end state
to what we think is possible.
If you're death-anxious,
you're gonna be very short-termistic.
If you're death-aware, you're gonna recognize
that it's not just about your life,
it's about the lives that came before
and the lives that came after.
What are we doing that outlives us
way beyond our own lifespan
to build another future for generations to come,
that makes you a great ancestor?
My name is Ari Wallach and I'm a futurist.
And I'm the author of "Longpath:
Becoming The Great Ancestors Our Future Needs."
We are in a moment of unbelievable flux
and change in society.
Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering,
nuclear weapons and obviously climate change.
The level of trust in major institutions
and narratives is an all-time low.
What that says to me, as an anthropologist,
is we are deep in an 'intertidal.'
So an intertidal is a moment in time
where the old ways of doing things, the institutions,
the narratives, and stories are no longer working-
but the new ones are yet to be born.
And I take that from an ocean metaphor.
The intertidal is this place
between where a high tide and low tide exist.
It's an area of high chaos, but also magnificent creativity.
And here's the thing, unlike previous intertidals,
this is the first major intertidal
where we're actually self-aware enough to know,
'Hey we're in an intertidal,
we're in the middle of something.'
And so how we are and act during this moment
sets the stage for the next several thousand years.
The issue is we are biologically prone
to short-term decision making.
15,000 years ago, if you and I were walking
and we came across a tree laden with fruit,
we would gorge ourselves cause we didn't know
where the next meal was gonna come from.
We were being short-termistic; that's okay.
But now we're using that kind of short-term thinking
and applying it everywhere.
But if we are going to skillfully navigate this intertidal,
we need a mindset that allows us to be future-conscious.
Longpath is one of many solutions
to help us skillfully navigate through this intertidal.
What Longpath asks us to do
is think about the ramifications of our day-to-day actions
and the impact they will have on future generations.
So more often than not, I say,
"Hey I have this mindset called Longpath,"
and people say, "Oh great, we're all gonna get into a room,
and we're gonna put post-it notes up
and we're gonna design the future we want.
I say, "No, actually what we're gonna do
is we're gonna talk about empathy."
Now, when we think of empathy
we often think about empathy in the present moment.
It's also about empathy for the future
or empathy for the past.
We call this 'Transgenerational empathy.'
Transgenerational empathy with the past,
asks us to look at our parents
or at the society and place them in context.
There are things that my mom and dad used to say,
that today would be called out as wrong.
The fact of the matter is that's gonna happen to us,
I guarantee you, in 400 years, 500 years.
Allowing us to look at the past and reconcile
with it in some ways actually cleans the slate.
So I know there are certain ways that I am in the world
that are because that's how my dad was
and his grandfather and their great-great-grandmother.
It doesn't mean we don't hold them accountable,
it means we put it within a context
that allows us to process it,
integrate it, and then move forward.
We then say, "What attributes do you wanna pass on?"
So we use empathy, 'cus it allows us to actually connect
with folks in the future in a way that will actually drive
actions in the present by us.
On the other hand, there's 'Futures thinking.'
Futures thinking is an invitation
to imagine something more than just a singular tomorrow.
We live in this idea of an 'Official future.'
And the official future usually is a set of assumptions,
mostly unsaid, about what tomorrow will be.
Well, who makes the official future?
Back in the 1930s at the World's Fair,
there was this exhibit called "Futurama,"
and was built by General Motors.
- [VOICE-OVER] Let's travel into the future.
- [ARI WALLACH] Now they had these amazing displays
about what the world of tomorrow would look like.
- [VOICE-OVER] And now we have arrived
in this wonder world of 1960.
- [ARI WALLACH] From education, into kitchens, universities-
but the one thing across the entire exhibit
were eight-lane highways.
- [VOICE-OVER] Accommodating traffic
at designated speeds of 50, 75, and 100 miles an hour.
- [ARI WALLACH] Well that's GM, so it makes sense
that the official future would have a lot of cars in it.
The official future of today is mostly driven
by technology or kind of a Silicon Valley way of thinking.
More often than not we live
in someone else's official future.
- [ELON MUSK] Eh, not bad.
- [ARI WALLACH] Futures with an 's', opens that up again
and says, "Well, there are many possible futures
that could happen."
So futures thinking explodes the idea of an official future.
But then the question becomes if it can be anything,
how do you decide which one you wanna move to?
What are the futures?
That's where 'telos' comes from:
it's from the ancient Greek of "ultimate aim."
What is the future that we want?
So our telos is always about thinking,
'Am I becoming a great ancestor?'
This is a big time for homo sapiens.
We can't just kind of let the future wash over us
or be dictated by people who say,
"Well, the future is going to be X."
The future isn't this distant place, it's not a noun.
It's actually a verb, it's something that you make.
If we wanna steer away
from this iceberg that we're heading towards,
we don't need a great man to do it for us,
we need collective action.
We may not all run companies
that can feed the world or build spaceships,
but it's really our behaviors and our values
that we have to start changing.
If we are to move forward as a people, as a species,
we have to plant trees whose shade we'll never know.
That's it, that's Longpath.
It's a mindset that instills that agency into the individual
to help us kind of navigate this moment skillfully.