It’s said that the older you get, the wiser you become. If not, at least we hope we do. Ideally, we go from being short-term, impulsive thinkers at an early age to long-term, thoughtful thinkers by the end of our lives.
As this happens, we learn how to plan more accurately, think about our families, and make decisions that lead to healthy and happy lives.
On the surface, this sounds natural and good. And it is. However, short- and long-term planning constrains us from thinking about life only during our living years. It prohibits us from thinking that we can make an impact beyond our life. Ultimately, it inhibits us from thinking on the most constructive timescale - generational.
The idea of generational thinking is most common when speaking about wealth. As Investopedia puts it:
The term “generational wealth” refers to assets passed by one generation of a family to another. Those assets can include stocks, bonds, and other investments, as well as real estate and family businesses.
Passing down assets through inheritance is the most prominent example of generational thinking, yet it’s not the only way to think about our impact beyond our life.
The most comprehensive form of generational thinking is multi-dimensional. Beyond wealth, it can extend to areas such as ecological decisions, construction materials, and economic policies.
Generational thinking leads us to be more thoughtful about the present and the future. However, as humans, we do a terrible job of thinking about the future.
The wrong timescale
Thinking beyond death is rarely taught. If it is, it has more to with an afterlife or has a religious bent. This lack of education of the future leads to erroneous thinking, or what is better coined as future fallacies.
There are many errors in our thinking, but these types of fallacies lead to false projections and an overall simplification of the future.
The first is the planning fallacy, which is fueled by the over-optimism bias.
Per the verywellmind, which aptly puts the optimism bias as the 'invulnerability bias":
“The optimism bias is essentially a mistaken belief that our chances of experiencing negative events are lower and our chances of experiencing positive events are higher than those of our peers.”
In the Journal of Future Studies, Ivana Milojevic elaborates on how over-optimism affects planning:
In a nutshell, researchers claim that there is an “optimistic bias in prediction”, which increases with temporal distance – i.e., the further away in the future, the less accurate the prediction of performance.
In other words, over-optimism gets worse as the future is far away. This leads to forecasting error and ultimately unforeseen consequences.
A prominent example of this from Milojevic is of the Sydney Opera House:
A case in point is the construction of the Sydney Opera House, with an original cost estimate of $7 million and a final cost of $102 million (Sydney Opera House, 2020). Construction was expected to take four years; instead, it took a full 14 years.
Planning biases fueled by over-optimism lead to ignoring the consequences of planning. Regardless of scale, we fall into a trap of thinking everything will go well. Thus, without risk planning or an appreciation for complexity, we tend to move ahead blindly and can end up in an unintended rabbit hole.
The linear projection fallacy
Similar to the planning fallacy, humans tend to imagine the future much like the present. We believe that the world will continue as it is, rather than go through a dramatic change in our lifetimes.
This is called the linear projection fallacy. A byproduct of the fallacy is thinking that the world progress incrementally or gradually, rather exponentially.
Taking technology as an example, incrementalism leads us to ignore two facts:
The power of compounding - technology improves at a rapid pace and goes through transformative cycles continuously
Tipping points - as technology gets cheaper, adoption becomes wider and the way of doing things changes dramatically
The rise of autonomous vehicles is an outstanding example of this, per Adam Dorr at the Elsevier:
There has been virtually no mention of self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the urban planning literature in the last five years. This is despairingly shortsighted given that AVs represent the most radical development in personal mobility in the last century, and will in turn create a cascade of social, economic, and environmental transformations in urban areas. Concerns that are central to urban planning such as traffic congestion, parking, suburban sprawl, commuting, public transit systems, and air quality will all be profoundly impacted by the widespread adoption of AVs which is expected to begin in the mid-2020s.
Beyond technology and the lack of foresight into its impact, the same concepts of compounding and tipping points can apply to other realms in our world.
In the history books, there is a multitude of examples of tipping points that have affected our reality today. Some reality-altering events that not many predicted include:
When America was discovered - imagine being an English citizen and believing that your country has only acquired another colony.
When the automobile was invented - imagine being a driver of a horse and buggy and believe that the invention wouldn’t be a threat to your career.
Our tendency to think incrementally leads to ignoring potential futures where new inventions or discoveries are made. Without this foresight, we collectively plan and behave according to current circumstances.
The ceteris paribus fallacy
The ceteris paribus fallacy, like the Latin origin, is the error that all things will remain the same, but only one thing will change.
Though better than the linear projection and planning fallacies, this myopic thinking leads us to ignore the other assumptions we’re making and just focus on one big one.
A simple example of this is taken from Coca-Cola vs Pepsi:
“If the price of Coca-Cola falls, ceteris paribus, its demand will increase. Ceteris paribus means that other factors are not considered, or are considered to remain constant. Pepsi may react and reduce their prices as well, which may mean demand remains unchanged.”
Not considering other factors in our analysis of the present and future leads to make simplified conclusions.
The planning, linear projection, and ceteris paribus all have one thing in common: they simplify the future state of the world.
Either through over-optimism, incrementalism, or myopic thinking, they all distort our reality, so we keep a positive, yet ignorant, narrative. Thinking in such a way can keep us happy, but it won’t help us behave in ways that create value beyond our living years.
Instead, we should make the conscious decision of embracing the complexity of reality and how much we don’t know about the future.
A sustainability mindset
Combating optimism, incrementalism, or single-sightedness is possible with a generational mindset. The best description of this mindset comes from Isabel Rimanoczy.
In her book, The Sustainability Mindset Principles: A Guide to Developing a Mindset for a Better World, Rimanoczy outlines a method of how to think more sustainably and how to create generational value.
To get there, Rimanoczy outlines four categorical mindsets we can adopt. The first two are most relevant to generational thinking.
The ecological worldview
The systems perspective
Emotional intelligence
Spiritual intelligence
An ecological worldview
An ecological worldview comprises becoming more eco-literate and understanding our contribution. Adopting these principles, we will gain an appreciation for all the complexity in the world, how it’s all linked and how we can influence it.
According to Rimanoczy, ecoliterarcy is defined as:
Understanding the state of the planet allows us to be more fully aware of the challenges, the complexity of how they are linked to each other, and to explore what it means to us.
Becoming an eco-literate individual gives us an advantage because it helps us understand how the ecological world is structured. It helps understand the dynamics and factors in play so we can act accordingly now and consciously contribute to a stable or better future.
This gives us a better appreciation of how complex the natural environment is, which can help us overcome the instinct of thinking the future is simple.
A systems perspective
The next construct Rimanoczy suggests is having a systems perspective.
She prescribes that we:
Take a long-term view
Consider all stakeholders inclusively, rather than just one or a few
Embrace the idea of flows and systems in nature and in our reality
Embrace the interconnectedness within the whole
As a byproduct of adopting systems thinking, we go from simply analyzing the factors and dynamics and take into consideration the relationships between them. This leads us to see patterns, flows, processes, and feedback loops so we can see the whole.
An example of the right timescale
We can find a unique example of having a sustainable mindset in Cherrapunji, India. Here, the War-Khasis have leveraged their surroundings, specifically the trees in their villages, to build living land bridges.
Known as the wettest place on the plant, Cherrapunji is home to the Ficus Elastic tree. The roots of this tree grow just slightly above the trunk and can be used for their own productive purposes. Being that there are many rivers in the area, the Khasis have used these roots as connective tissue for their bridges.
The bridges themselves take decades to grow to strength. However, since the inception of this practice almost 1500 years ago, the Khasis have built 75 bridges, most of which still exist today. Some may be well over 500 hundred years old and are over a 100 ft long.
The Khasis mindset
Without knowing it, the Khasis have successfully adopted a generational mindset. Many of these bridges have no utility to them in the present, yet they build for future generations. They embrace the complexity of living in a naturally wet area have learned to leverage the advantages it brings by constructing helpful structures.
From a systems perspective, they understand and trust how the trees act as systems themselves. That if they are to configure them in a specific way, they will grow to be productive parts of their daily lives.
Conclusion
Naturally, having a long-term view is difficult. We derive pleasure from the present and incorporating the future into our decision framework is a challenge and sometimes totally undesirable.
Yet, the wealthiest people in our networks take the effort to build generational wealth. However, we don’t need to amass a fortune to build generational value. We can make an impact and create and pass value in different ways.
Instead of succumbing to present pressures and future fallacies, we can adopt a sustainability mindset. With it, we can recognize the complexity of the world and its natural systematic flows and processes. Seeing the present in this way can benefit how the future will turn out.