Ari Wallach, a futurist and founder of Longpath Labs, challenges listeners to think beyond their own lifetimes. He discusses 'lifetime bias' and how our awareness of mortality influences short-term decisions. Wallach emphasizes the need for transgenerational empathy to connect with our ancestry and adequately shape a better future. He introduces the concept of Longpath, which encourages daily actions that benefit future generations. With a focus on collective behavior change, Wallach inspires a mindset that prioritizes our legacy.
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insights INSIGHT
Lifespan Bias Limits Our Planning
Humans have a lifespan bias that makes us plan in years instead of centuries.
Ari Wallach says this short-term view constrains our ability to become great ancestors.
insights INSIGHT
We Are Living In An Intertidal
We are in an unprecedented intertidal of social change where old institutions fail and new ones haven't formed.
Wallach argues our collective actions now will shape the next several thousand years.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Adopt A Future-Conscious Mindset
Develop a future-conscious mindset to escape biologically driven short-termism.
Wallach's Longpath asks you to weigh day-to-day actions by their impact on future generations.
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Futurist Ari Wallach asks, “how do you want to be remembered?”
Humans have a "lifetime bias." When we plan ahead, we do so by thinking in terms of years and decades rather than centuries and millennia.
We need to escape this short-term thinking if we want to be great ancestors to the generations of humans that will come after us.
One way to do so is through transgenerational empathy, by which we reconcile ourselves with the past in order to focus on the attributes that we want to pass on to the next generation.
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This video is part of The Progress Issue, a Big Think and Freethink special collaboration.
In this inaugural special issue we set out to explore progress — how it happens, how we nurture it and how we stifle it, and what changes are required in how we approach our most serious problems to ensure greater and more equitable progress for all.
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About Ari Wallach
Ari Wallach is an applied futurist and Executive Director of Longpath Labs. He is the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs by HarperCollins and the creator and host of the forthcoming series on PBS A Brief History of the Future, which is being executive produced by Kathryn Murdoch and Drake. He has been a strategy and foresight advisor to Fortune 100 companies, the US Department of State, the Ford Foundation, the UN Refugee Agency, the RacialEquity 2030 Challenge and Politico’s Long Game Forum. As adjunct associate professor at Columbia University he lectured on innovation, AI, and the future of public policy. Wallach's TED talk on Longpath has been viewed 2.6 million times and translated into 21 languages. Ari was the co-creator of 2008's pro-Obama The Great Schlep with Sarah Silverman. He has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, CNBC, Vox, and more. He lives in the lower Hudson Valley with his wife, three children and wonderdog Ozzie. More at Longpath.org and @ariw.
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