Ari Wallach - Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs – An Antidote for Short-Termism

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I strive to become a great ancestor to the multitudes

of generations to come, but above that,

I hope I have been a great father to my children

Eliana, Ruby, and Gideon.

This book is dedicated to you and all

that you are and will become.

One day a man named Choni was walking along and saw a man planting a carob tree. Choni asked him, How many years will it take until it will bear fruit? He said to him, Not for seventy years. Choni said to him, Do you really believe youll live another seventy years?

The man answered, I found this world provided with carob trees, and as my ancestors planted them for me, so I too plant them for my descendants.

FROM THE TALMUD (TAANIT 23A)

A t the heart of the city of Rome, Italy, stands the Colosseum. To this day, you can visit this iconic structure, marveling at the millions of cubic feet of travertine stone, stacked without mortar, that comprise its towering outer wall. You can stand where gladiators once stood and imagine the roar of more than fifty thousand cheering spectators. If you look up, you can see stalls that housed the members of the audience, completed in 80 AD. Most likely, the people filling those stalls shifted about in their seats, the hot sun beating down, snacking on chickpeas and drinking wine while waiting for the next spectacle. In the tunnels below, exotic animals paced and fightersmany slaves or criminalsawaited their fates. The smell of blood, sweat, and decay most likely permeated the bowels of the Colosseum, where the line between life and death neared its thinnest point.

We can go to this space and stand in the shadow of emperors and commoners, of women and men living very human lives. Fear and joy, hunger and satisfaction, stress and dreams all wove themselves into the lived experiences of these ancient Romans. Perhaps you can see some of yourself in them, or some of their legacies in you.

Now imagine the year 4020 AD. Hard to fathom, but it is the same distance forward in time that the gladiator age is back in time from my writing this in 2022. What will the inhabitants and visitors to Rome see then? What will they imagine about our lives today? Will they visit a soccer stadium and imagine the roar of fans? Will they pay an entry fee to view the remnants of a gas-powered Vespa scooter? Will they marvel at simulations of traffic dysfunctions that led an average motorist to lose 254 hours a year, trapped in a metal box with wheels? Will they recreate gelato recipes, using the old ways? Is pizza still a thing? What will they think about the problems we faced? Will they look at graphs showing extreme rises in temperatures or drought and resent us or be proud of us for the actions we took? Will they imagine the chaos of a global pandemic and feel confusion or empathy about our response? In a time that is sooner than we think, we will be their ancient past, their history. What will they write about us?

I love considering time in this way. While the Roman Colosseum is a big-picture example, you can create puzzles with time in ways that feel even closer to you. For those of you who are Gen X or older like me, imagine where you were in the year 1990what did you think about? What did you wear? What music did you listen to? What were your most pressing problems? It doesnt seem that long ago, right? Now, if I do a little bit of math, I can tell you that today you are closer to the year 2050 than you are to 1990. In 2050, they will be listening to what you hear as todays top hits regularly on Spotify on a golden oldies channel. In case you didnt know already, the unimaginable future of yesterday is now here.

The book youre about to read will stretch time, your brain, and your heart so that you can become the great ancestors the future needs you to be. Together, were going to explore how looking at time with a wider lens, coupled with our emotional and collaborative strengths, can make us great ancestors and help us in our own lives. Were going to look at 4020 A.D. and imagine the type of people that we want to be inhabiting the Earth, what they will care about, and how we can help them manifest their best lives by laying some foundations today. Whats more, were going to learn that this timethis very momentis one of the best chances we have to make a huge impact on the lives of those to come. Lets get started.

Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the groundthe unborn of the future Nation.

FROM THE GREAT LAW OF THE HAUDENOSAUNEE, THE FOUNDING DOCUMENT OF THE IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY

Y ou might expect Id start a book titled Longpath with a story about how every journey of a thousand miles starts with a first step. Or maybe youre expecting to read about the twenty-year journey to build the Transcontinental Railroad connecting the east and west coasts of America, or the two-hundred-year process of building the Great Wall of China, or maybe even something about moonshots. Perhaps you expect a sermon on how we need to really, truly start acting on climate change, because there will soon be a billion climate refugees roaming the planet in search of shelter and water. Ill get to all of these in good time, but truth be told, the story of the future of human civilization often starts with something pretty innocuous. For instance, a buzz from a phone.

I was in the kitchen making my world-famous dragon eggs dinner (eggs scrambled with cut-up hot dogs and cheese) when I felt a vibration in my pocket. It was an app notification from our local school. My twelve-year-old daughter, Ruby, had missed turning in her Spanish assignment, which had been due exactly twelve seconds before. My instant reaction to that buzzing, though, was hundreds of thousands of years in the making. All sorts of chemicals and neurotransmitters started firing in my brain. Anger that she missed the assignment, sure, but beneath that was shame (what kind of parent am I?), fear (if she keeps this up, she wont get into her choice of college), and a deep-seated sense that by doing something wrong, I had upset members of the tribe and was going to find myself pushed out of the cave tonight, forced to fend for myself against large animals with very big teeth. With all this going through my mind and body, I had a choice to make: freak out, lose my shit, yell at Ruby, or pause... and follow the principles of Longpath.

Longpatha simple but profound mindset that shifts thinking from the short term to the long termallowed me to take that half-second pause and recognize the swirl of chemicals and hormones rapidly welling up inside me. And in that pause are the hundreds of thousands of years that came before that moment, the hundreds of thousands of years that would come after, and the awareness that I was just a link in a greater chain of being. I was, in my best impression of Carl Sagan, part of a pale blue dot in the ever-expanding universe of space and time. Half a second later, I realized that whether Ruby knew what