The Clock of the Long Now with its prototype at the science museum in London and its full scale $42 million version funded by Jeff Bezos and under construction in Texas is a clock that is meant to keep time for the next 10,000 years and while the full scale project drew quite a bit of controversy it was meant to clearly point out the following: it is only when we expand our horizons and take a glance at the distant future when we finally become capable of truly making good decisions.
The founder of Amazon himself talked extensively about why he poured so much money in such a seemingly irrelevant project to which he responded by saying that for him this project was a metaphor that he intended to share with the rest of the world and the generations to come. This metaphor is predominantly about promoting future thinking and a long-term perspective among all citizens of the world given that Jeff Bezos himself attributes his success to the ability to go beyond the noise of the present and focus on the aspirations of the future which then allowed him to do things that at his time seemed unnecessary. “Why buy a book online and wait for it to be delivered when you can just walk into a bookstore, smell the coffee, enjoy the scenery, touch the books, and select the one that you want?” Or so said many who could not understand why a website with the bizarre name of Amazon would ever turn such an idea into a online store. Fast forward to decades and now Amazon is the fourth highest valued corporation in the world and it not only sells books more than any other bookstore, it sells just about anything available in the market.
Long-term thinking and taking into consideration the abstract concept of the future which is by no means real and then taking action in the present moment based upon that ideal is not something that comes to us naturally. After all, humans have evolved as hunters and gatherers who spent most of their time looking for food and due to our inability to store food we had to keep repeating this process perpetually without much concern for the future. Even at the dawn of the agricultural age our future perspective was limited to the next two seasons and almost nobody planned their lives beyond that. Yet when we take a look at the majority of successes in the modern world we realize that almost all of them were the result of long-term thinking that went far beyond the next two seasons and took into consideration all the possible events that could occur in decades to come.
That is why today I would like to encourage you the reader to take into consideration all the decisions you have made so far and make an honest assessment of how many of those decisions were made with your ideal future in mind. Alas, in most cases we realize that we ended up making our decisions in the heat of the moment and often to our detriment which is why having such symbols as the Clock of the Long Now can be a wake up call and a reminder that if we are to look back at our lives a decade from now and be proud of all the decisions that we have made by then we need to start shifting our perspective towards the long term and make decisions in a way that will benefit us in the future. It is worth mentioning that having a future perspective does not imply abandoning the present, quite the contrary, by abandoning our pursuit of making the present happy and enjoyable we will also sabotage our future given that neglecting the present for the sake of the future can only be maintained for so long before we realize that we have no motivation left to continue on this path.
In this regard the keyword here is “sustainability” and if we are to win we need to make sure our present is sustainable and we cannot sustain the present if we are to fully neglect it. Hence, it is best to maintain a balance between the present and the future. Only attempting to enjoy the moment is as unsustainable as an incessant obsession with the future at the cost of the present, however, by dividing our attention equally between making the present as pleasant as possible while planning logically and working ambitiously for a bright future we are sure to have the best of both worlds which ironically is one of the key elements of sustainable success and happiness. Let us enjoy the present moment but also remember that The Clock of the Long Now is ticking!
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Daniel Molgan Official 