Review: Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs - An Antidote for Short-Termism

Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs - An Antidote for Short-Termism by Ari Wallach
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the book “10-10-10” by Suzy Welch, the author suggests that a good way to consider the possible impacts of a decision are to think of the impacts in 10 minutes, 10 weeks, and 10 years. By doing this, you consider the results of your action from different perspectives. “Longpath” is the same kind of book, recommending the consideration of impacts of your actions and decisions in three different time perspectives. Here, the author choses the immediate past, the individual present, and the long term future. The past timeframe is more of a reflection on the impact to others. The present is defined as the impact on the self, and the long term uses the term ancestry, so you are really thinking long term. I found this long-term thinking to be somewhat ill defined for purpose. When you think long term, you need to understand the many possible directions that the world could go in. I expected the author would talk about scenarios, or discuss that the farther out one goes, the more the imagined future could be anything. No, instead the author suggested leaning on virtues, personal and societal, to make decisions. And there was a disregard for those unintended consequences that could outweigh the virtuous good in a decision. And strangely, when the author mentions an effort to involve all citizens of a Caribbean country in a kind of group study of possible futures, apropos to the ideas in this book, he drops the subject with just the mention. I liked the idea of thinking through decisions based on lenses of differing time horizons, but by placing one so far in the future, the message seems diminished.

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