Playing the Long Game

It’s interesting what inspires or motivates an article. It might be a conversation, a good book, a song from days gone by. Sometimes there’s just a deadline waiting to be met. In the case of “Playing the Long Game“, my latest article at H+ Magazine, it was a recent tweet by its editor, Michael Anissimov:

This is a sentiment I definitely share and it got me to thinking: Here we are, the one animal that’s capable of planning days, weeks, even years in advance. What is that keeps us locked into short-term thinking? Why aren’t we making better use of this unique and powerful ability? As it turns out, I came up with quite a few factors. How we work, how we play, how we interact — a whole lot of our modern lifestyle encourages us to avoid long-term thinking and planning.

All of this perpetuates a shallowness of thought that impacts our decision making in so many spheres. Too often, our political system is hobbled by thinking that expects simplistic, slogan-ready solutions to increasingly complex problems in an increasingly complex world. Higher education teaches yesterday’s skills for jobs that soon won’t exist, instead of developing critical thinking and other adaptive skills in anticipating the needs of tomorrow. In short, all this living for the moment makes us forget there is a world that lies beyond the fifteen minute horizon and we are suffering for it.

While we face some very big challenges in the coming century, I do think we have it in us to deal with them. But it might mean making some changes to how we think about today and tomorrow.