The Art of Long-Term Thinking in a Short-Sighted World

Imagine you’re offered a bet: You can have $1 million today, or you can have ownership of one square mile of Manhattan real estate, but you can’t sell it for 100 years. The catch? You’ll never personally see the payoff — only your great-grandchildren will. Would you take it?

Imagine a different bet: You can have $1 million today, or you can have a penny that doubles every day for 100 years. Your great-grandchildren will curse your name if you take the million.

This isn’t just a math problem — it’s how modern society handles long-term thinking. We’re collectively taking the million dollars, over and over again, while exponential opportunities compound quietly in the background.

Here’s a fun fact: The Long Now Foundation has a 10,000-year clock being built inside a mountain in Texas. It’s designed to tick once per year, with the century hand moving once every hundred years. The cuckoo comes out every millennium.

Most people’s reaction to this is either “that’s awesome” or “what a waste of money.” Very few stop to ask the interesting question: Why does this feel so weird to us?

Humans are really bad at long-term thinking. This isn’t exactly news — behavioral economists have been pointing this out for decades. But what’s fascinating is how our inability to think long-term creates these weird blind spots in our civilization:

• We build houses to last 50 years when the Romans built structures still standing after 2,000
• We create programming languages that will be obsolete in a decade
• We design cities around cars, a technology that’s barely 100 years old
• We store our most important data in formats that might be unreadable in 30 years

It’s like we’re playing chess while deliberately refusing to think more than two moves ahead.

This isn’t universal. Some organizations DO think long-term, and the results are fascinating:

1. The Catholic Church plans centuries ahead. They still write important documents in Latin, just in case the vernacular changes too much. They buy real estate like they’re planning to hold it until the Second Coming (which, fair enough, they are).
2. Japanese companies like Kongō Gumi operated continuously for over 1,400 years. Their secret? They thought in terms of centuries, not quarters.
3. The Dutch built their flood control systems to withstand storms that happen once every 10,000 years. They’re basically betting their entire country on their engineering, and they’re taking that bet seriously.

Here’s my theory: Long-term thinking isn’t just about patience — it’s about power laws.

Most really important things follow power laws. A small number of decisions account for most of the impact. But here’s the trick: You often can’t tell which decisions those are until you look back from far enough in the future.

The person who decided where to put Manhattan probably didn’t think they were making a trillion-dollar real estate decision. The first person to write down the Bible probably didn’t think they were creating a text that would shape civilization for millennia.

So what would it look like if we actually tried to think long-term?

Imagine:

• Universities designed to operate for 1,000 years
• Programming languages designed to be readable in 2524
• Environmental policies that think in terms of geological time
• Art created to be meaningful to humans 500 years from now

But more importantly: Imagine if we started asking “What would this look like in 100 years?” as often as we ask “What would this look like next quarter?”

There’s a cognitive bias here that’s worth pointing out. When we think about the past, we naturally focus on the things that lasted. Nobody writes histories about all the forgotten empires that disappeared without a trace. This creates a survivorship bias in how we think about permanence.

But maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe the secret to building things that last isn’t some special technique or material. Maybe it’s just the simple decision to try to build things that last.

Coming back to our opening bets: The interesting thing isn’t the math (though yes, the penny wins by a ridiculous margin). The interesting thing is how few people or organizations even think to make these kinds of trades.

We’re living in a world that’s increasingly optimized for quarterly reports and daily news cycles. But the really big wins — the ones that reshape civilization — almost always come from thinking in decades or centuries.

So here’s my modest proposal: Let’s start a lab. The 100-Year lab. The entry requirement is simple: Make one decision this year that only makes sense if you’re thinking a century ahead.

After all, someone is going to be alive in 100 years, dealing with the consequences of what we do today. 

We might as well do them a favor.