Changing Our Perspective On Time

Humans tend to be short sighted when it comes to planning for the future. Few of us look generations ahead, past our deaths, out into periods of time familiar to historians. That can have some serious consequences, as we're finding out when trying to deal with climate change.

The Long Time is an attempt to change that. It deserves your attention.

A few weeks ago, the IPCC released a report about climate change so devastating that some of its authors were in tears at the launch. It highlighted how our actions now will determine the kinds of lives future inhabitants of the planet will have, and ultimately whether they will have lives at all. We hold immense responsibility for the future, yet in these times of apocalyptic news cycles, it can feel that everything is extremely urgent but happening too fast to change. We hold immense power, yet feel impotent. In the face of global anxiety, we put our heads down and our horizons get closer and closer. The problem is that the tunnel vision of short-term thinking is leading to decisions that might mean we are only left with a short term as a species.

We’ve started the Long Time project as we believe that: Our capacity to care about the future is crucial to our ability to preserve it, developing longer perspectives on our existence will change the way we behave in the short term, and art and culture will be crucial to making the much needed transformative shift in attitudes and behaviours. Here we explain both why and how, proposing five paths to safeguarding the long-term…