The Long Now

I wrote the first draft of this essay almost two years ago in Cape May, New Jersey. We'd driven down the day before, it was a Saturday morning and it had snowed during the night. My heavily pregnant wife was taking a mid-morning nap and I spent an hour sitting by the fire, drinking cappuccino and reading The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand.

As I was reading I became hyper-aware of the present moment, and I had a realization that I'd been living with temporal tunnel vision.

My time-horizon at that point was short, mostly I was living purely in the day or week immediately in front of me. I was the founder of a startup that was trying to achieve product-market fit and not die. We'd raised a few million dollars of pre-seed and we were feeling the squeeze.

A mentor of mine, a successful founder, would always tell me to "focus on the stuff right in front of you, and then the extreme future, ignore everything in the middle". I still think this is good advice. But I'd basically just been hopping blindly from one day or week to the next. I was like a man in a blizzard who can see about 3 feet in front of him.

I'd mistaken this for presence. For mindfulness, even. I've meditated a fair bit over the years, and my practice has varied between regular and deep to nothing at all. This is to say that I thought I understood what it meant to be in the moment.

Something came together in that hour, it felt like an hour where time didn't exist. An ever stretching present. The crackle of the fire, the sound of the ocean.

It gave me some perspective on my relationship with time. Acute awareness of the difference between being present and being reactive. What I'd called focus was just captivity to the stochastic ping-pong of daily life.

This is easy to slide into. You have quarterly targets that translate into monthly goals that become weekly sprints that decompose into daily tasks. You also have a family, and everything that throws up—dentist appointments, pediatrician visits, groceries. The machinery of maintenance.

And so you're always living slightly ahead of where you actually are. There's a small but constant tension, a pull forward, that means you're never quite here. You're thinking about the next thing.

But you're also not living in the grandness of time, the sweep of ages or your own lifetime.

My daughter is almost two now.

I understand this tension differently than I did in Cape May. Fatherhood has compressed and expanded time simultaneously. The days are long and the years are short, as everyone warns you. But there's something else too.

Some mornings, I'm up before anyone else in the house. My daughter wakes, and I bring her downstairs, and we sit together in the early light. She points at things. I name them. The clock ticks. Nothing else is happening.

These moments are the most present I've ever been. And I think the reason is that they exist in the context of the longest time horizon I've ever held: her life, and what comes after it.

This is the paradox I've been circling for two years now. The best way to inhabit the present might be to extend your view of time. Not to this week or this month, but to lifetimes. To your children's lifetimes. Maybe beyond.

Most of my friends in tech have a time horizon that ends at the exit. Two years, three years, maybe five. Then: freedom. Freedom for what? Nobody's quite sure. And when the exit doesn't come, or takes longer than expected, there's a quiet desperation underneath the surface. A sense that the years are being spent rather than invested.

I loved what we built at Workbounce. I still love building things. But like most startups, what we made will eventually be deprecated in favor of something else. We solved immediate problems for commercial benefit. That's the job. Immediate problems are the only ones people will pay to solve.

But there's a part of me—maybe the most important part—that wants to build something of utility for my great-grandchildren. And yours.

I don't mean a company. Companies rarely last that long, and when they do, they become something unrecognizable. I mean something more like an orientation. A way of thinking. A set of ideas that compounds.

Brand writes about pace layers—the different speeds at which civilization operates. Fashion moves fast. Commerce moves slower. Infrastructure slower still. Culture, governance, nature: each layer slower than the last. The fast layers get the attention. The slow layers have the power.

Most knowledge work operates at the fashion layer. We're optimizing for quarterly results, for product launches, for metrics that will be irrelevant in eighteen months. There's nothing wrong with this—someone has to work at the fast layers. But if that's all you do, you lose something. You become untethered from the slower, deeper currents that actually determine where things go.

The most human way of living and working, I've come to believe, is to operate at multiple layers simultaneously. To do the daily work, yes. But to hold it in the context of something longer.

A multi-planetary civilization is one such container. It's a spatial and temporal goal large enough to put the tasks of today into perspective. Climate, maybe. The long arc of your family. The kind of culture you want to exist in a hundred years.

The specific goal matters less than the act of holding it. The long view creates a kind of gravitational stability. It lets you be present precisely because you're not trapped in the present.

I'm not sure I have a solution to the ping-pong problem. Maybe nobody does. The demands of modern life are real, and they won't stop pinging.

But I've noticed something since Cape May. When I remember to look up—when I think about my daughter at twenty, at forty, about the world she'll inherit—the immediate pressures don't disappear, but they get quieter. The list is still there. I just don't feel pulled by it in the same way.

The snow melted that morning in Cape May. My wife woke up. We made breakfast and talked about nothing in particular. I don't remember what was on my to-do list that day.

I remember the fire. I remember her breathing. I remember the birds.

Maybe that's the point.