Longpath

How do you make choices today that will still matter hundreds—or even thousands—of years from now? In Longpath, futurist and strategist Ari Wallach asks you to zoom out of your short-term mindset and see yourself as part of humanity’s much larger continuum. He argues that to thrive on an increasingly unstable and interconnected planet, we must consciously become great ancestors—people who act with the future in mind.

Wallach’s core claim is that our civilization is trapped inside what he calls the “short-term loop”—a culture addicted to instant gratification, quarterly profits, and short attention spans. Yet the global crises of our era—from climate change to social fragmentation—demand long-term, empathetic, and cooperative thinking. His answer is the Longpath mindset—a new way of seeing, feeling, and acting that carries you beyond the immediate moment and into the flow of generations past, present, and future.

Three Dimensions of Longpath Thinking

At its core, Wallach defines Longpath as having three integrated pillars. First is transgenerational empathy—a practice of seeing yourself as a link in a chain of being that stretches backward to your ancestors and forward to your descendants. Second is futures thinking—the ability to imagine multiple possible, plausible, and desired futures, rather than clinging to what Wallach calls the “Official Future” fed to us by institutions, media, and habit. The third pillar is telos, a Greek term meaning “ultimate purpose.” It asks: What is our collective destination as a species? What’s the point of all this?

Each of these pillars becomes a mental and emotional muscle that expands your sense of time and responsibility. The goal isn’t just to plan ahead—it’s to feel the long term inside your body, decisions, and relationships.

Why We Need Longpath Now

Wallach situates this mindset within what he calls an Intertidal era—a moment like the place between the ocean and the shore, where the ground shifts constantly and survival depends on adaptation. Humanity has reached such an Intertidal period, caught between the old systems that are collapsing (industrial capitalism, rigid nationalism, extractive economics) and the new ones still emerging. In these moments of chaos, small changes can create huge transformations—if we know how to channel them.

Rather than view the Intertidal as simply crisis, Wallach reframes it as opportunity. Just as barnacles, mussels, and sea life find ingenious ways to thrive in turbulent tides, we, too, can use change to reimagine how to live, work, and cooperate for centuries to come. The Longpath lens gives us tools to steady ourselves amid complexity and to intentionally shape evolution itself.

Emotion as a Guiding Force

A surprising theme in Wallach’s work is that emotion isn’t a distraction from rationality—it’s our evolutionary gift. He notes that Western culture, since the Enlightenment, has sidelined feeling as irrational. But Wallach argues that emotions like empathy, awe, gratitude, and compassion are technologies of long-term thinking. They are how we connect across time, how we imagine the experiences of the unborn or understand the mistakes of our ancestors. In essence, Longpath isn’t just about reasoning better—it’s about feeling more deeply.

This emotional dimension makes the concept highly accessible. You don’t need a PhD to start practicing Longpath; you only need to pay attention to your reactions, to pause before defaulting to short-term impulses, and to ask better questions about your impact over time.

Living as a Longpath Mindset

Throughout the book, Wallach shares a blend of science, philosophy, and lived stories—from a student missing a homework deadline to his own family’s legacy of Holocaust survival—to show how ordinary choices ripple through centuries. Longpath isn’t an abstract theory; it’s a daily practice. When you pause before reacting, when you choose sustainability over speed, when you ask, “What kind of ancestor am I being right now?” you’re Longpathing.

Wallach also balances optimism with urgency. He acknowledges that the same technologies connecting us can destroy us through misinformation, surveillance, or unchecked AI. Yet, precisely because humans are imaginative and emotionally adaptive, we can co-create futures that are more equitable, compassionate, and enduring—if we deliberately choose to.

From Individual Choice to Collective Culture

Ultimately, Wallach envisions a humanity that flourishes not through rugged individualism but through collective foresight and empathy. The Longpath mindset invites you to shift your identity from “me” to “we,” recognizing that your joy, your legacy, and your survival depend on how well you nurture the web of life around you. By combining introspection, empathy, and action, you contribute not only to your own well-being but to the flourishing of those yet to come. As Wallach reminds us, “There is no individual salvation.” Flourishing, like survival, is a team sport that spans generations.

Wallach calls short-termism the defining psychological condition of our age. It’s the human tendency to favor immediate rewards, quick fixes, and the next dopamine hit over enduring values or consequences. This “sandbag strategy”—his metaphor for plugging leaks during a flood rather than fixing the foundation—permeates our institutions, from politics to parenting to business.

How We Got Stuck in the Now

Biologically, short-term thinking once kept us alive. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, reacting quickly to threats meant survival. The brain’s limbic system and amygdala evolved to prioritize fight-or-flight impulses. But those instincts now misfire in modern contexts. A late email, a falling stock price, or an online comment can trigger the same neural cascade as a predator attack. As media, apps, and markets reward instant reactions, our capacity for foresight shrinks.

Economically, Wallach points out, corporate and political systems reinforce this bias. Leaders plan by quarters or election cycles. Citizens and consumers are trained to demand immediate gratification. Psychologically, we’ve entered what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls the age of “presentism”—a perpetual now where history and future collapse into an endless scroll of updates.

Spotlight Thinking and Dopamine Loops

Wallach uses a vivid parable: the “streetlight effect.” Like a drunk searching for lost keys under the streetlight because it’s where the light is best, we look for answers only where attention shines brightest. Technology narrows our spotlight. Notifications and endless news feeds hijack the brain’s reward system—the same circuitry our ancestors used for food and belonging—to keep us hooked. An alert about your child’s missing homework, like the one that triggered Wallach’s opening story, feels like existential danger when it’s really a modern glitch in ancient wiring.

Breaking the Cycle: Awareness, Belief, Cultivation

To counter this, Wallach proposes a three-step ABC practice:

• Awareness: Notice your default reactions. Track the moments when you choose urgency over meaning—like checking your phone before speaking with your kids.
• Belief: Believe that change is possible. Neuroscience shows that through neuroplasticity, we can rewire our brains for patience, empathy, and foresight (as Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” demonstrates).
• Cultivation: Practice daily habits that reinforce slower, more intentional thinking, such as device breaks, reflection rituals, or future-focused conversations with colleagues and family.

The shift begins internally but scales outward through culture. When enough people pause before reacting, networks of awareness form that gradually reshape collective behavior.

Reclaiming Time as a Moral Act

At its heart, escaping short-termism isn’t just a mental exercise—it’s an ethical one. As Wallach writes, time is the ultimate commons we share. To slow down is to take responsibility for others. Choosing patience over panic, reflection over reactivity, and long-term value over short-term reward is how you begin to live in “long time.” In this sense, every moment of mindfulness becomes an act of collective repair, planting the seeds for the future to take root.

The first pillar of Longpath is Transgenerational Empathy—the capacity to think, feel, and act as part of a long human continuum. Instead of perceiving time as a straight line from birth to death, you visualize yourself as one link in an unbroken chain reaching far backward and forward.

Honoring the Past

Wallach illustrates this through the stories of his parents: his father, a Jewish resistance fighter orphaned in World War II, and his mother, an artist trained under futurist Buckminster Fuller. From this lineage—one steeped in trauma, survival, and creativity—Wallach learned that the past lives inside us. Our reactions, fears, and instincts are not only genetic but emotional inheritances. Recognizing these inherited patterns grants freedom: you can choose what to pass on and what to release.

Empathy for Self

To practice empathy for others, you must start with yourself. Wallach describes self-compassion as a Longpath superpower—the courage to see your mistakes without shame and to align your actions with your values. Using techniques like mindfulness or NASA’s “Pause and Learn” approach, you can turn failures into feedback loops. This compassionate awareness is what psychologist Jamil Zaki calls “the gateway emotion”—it transforms guilt into growth.

Empathy for Descendants

Finally, empathy must extend forward in time. You don’t need to be a parent to have descendants—your influence ripples through students, colleagues, neighbors, and policy decisions. Wallach asks readers to imagine holding space for their future kin: What would your great-great-grandchild thank—or blame—you for? What values would you want them to inherit? This shift from ego to legacy reframes daily choices—from energy use to tone of voice—as acts of ancestorhood.

He cites the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Great Law of Peace, which instructs leaders to consider the next seven generations in every decision. Modern science supports this mindset: studies show that when people vividly imagine their future selves, they make more ethical, sustainable, and long-term choices. (In one Stanford study, participants who saw aged digital avatars of themselves doubled their retirement savings.)

From Legacy to Great Ancestorhood

Practicing Transgenerational Empathy means understanding that death is not an end but a handoff. Every word, product, and social system you shape becomes someone else’s inheritance. In that sense, empathy across time becomes a moral compass—helping you design institutions, relationships, and works of art that future generations can thrive within. As Wallach puts it, “If we become true ancestors, our deaths give life to what comes next.”

The second pillar of Longpath is Futures Thinking and Telos—the art of actively co-creating the future instead of passively inheriting it. Wallach argues that most of us live by an “Official Future,” the unspoken script society hands us about what progress looks like: study hard, buy a house, consume more, colonize Mars. But these assumptions, rooted in the Enlightenment’s mechanistic worldview, are cracking in our Intertidal age.

The Death of the Official Future

Wallach shows how our inherited narratives of endless growth and technological salvation have failed. Despite smartphones, AI, and Mars rovers, inequality grows, polarization deepens, and ecosystems collapse. The very tools meant to liberate us now manipulate our attention and behavior. “The Official Future,” he writes, “no longer fits the world we live in.” To survive, we must diversify our imagination.

Opening the Futures Cone

Borrowing from futurist Joseph Voros, Wallach presents the Futures Cone, a diagram that expands from a narrow line of the present into widening possibilities. Within that cone are many potential futures:

• Plausible futures—what might happen if trends continue.
• Possible futures—what could happen if we stretch imagination and assumptions.
• Examined, desired futures—what should happen if we align our actions with our values and telos.

Through accessible examples—like a Kansan boy named Tim who dreams beyond his small town or a car company reimagining its purpose beyond profit—Wallach shows how to move from plausible to desired futures through reflection and collective dialogue. Each level of questioning broadens possibility and embeds conscience into design.

Telos: Humanity’s North Star

While many futurists focus on forecasting trends, Wallach insists on purpose. He revives the ancient concept of telos—the ultimate goal or end. What is our Ithaca, he asks, referencing Odysseus’s long voyage home? What horizon keeps us moving through storms? For Ari Wallach, that telos is collective flourishing: a civilization where empathy, equity, creativity, and ecological balance enable humans to thrive together for millennia.

This ethical vision transforms how we innovate, govern, and live. It asks companies to measure success by legacy, not quarterly return; asks families to weigh choices by generational impact; and invites each of us to ask, before major decisions, “Is this aligned with the world I want to birth?” With that question, we stop predicting the future—and start parenting it.

Longpath culminates in the collective dimension: building communities that think, feel, and design together across time. Wallach observes that the Western myth of rugged individualism—celebrated in self-help aisles and startup slogans—cannot solve global-scale problems like climate collapse or social fragmentation. “There is no individual salvation,” he warns. Flourishing requires cooperation.

Relational Tension as Strength

Wallach likens healthy collaboration to the structure of a geodesic dome—a design Buckminster Fuller popularized. Each triangle bears tension, but together they create resilience. Disagreement and difference, he argues, are not threats but forces of stability. Like hip-hop meeting Broadway in Hamilton, creative friction generates cultural evolution.

Finding the Others

To live Longpath collectively, we must “find the others”—recognize each “me” as part of “we.” Wallach tells tender stories: a friend reconciling political rifts with her brother, strangers comforted by shared grief, mothers nodding to one another over newborns. Each moment of empathy rebuilds the lattice of human connection that short-termism eroded. Relational gestures—from shared meals to dialogue circles—are modern rites of passage that turn isolation into belonging.

Four Modes of Influence

Wallach offers four modes for spreading the Longpath mindset within your sphere of influence:

• Vision: Share stories or creative projects that depict desirable futures—like Star Trek inspiring technological progress and inclusion.
• Conversation: Engage others respectfully; shift talk from “Who’s right?” to “What kind of world are we building?”
• Facilitation: Create psychologically safe spaces—like Death Over Dinner or community design sessions—where people can co-envision change.
• Ways of Being: Embody long-term values in daily gestures—saving the last slice of pie, keeping promises, offering care. Small acts compound into culture.

These micro-actions are what Wallach calls “trim tabs,” borrowing from Fuller’s metaphor of the tiny rudder plate that turns massive ships. When millions of people adjust their trim tabs—by listening, envisioning, and connecting differently—the collective trajectory of humanity shifts course.

Wallach ends with optimism rooted in practicality. You don’t need to lead a revolution; you just need to ripple goodness across your networks. Every decision—buying sustainably, mentoring others, showing compassion under stress—is a Longpath act. Through these small, intentional gestures, we shape a civilization better aligned with its rightful telos: the shared flourishing of all life, now and far beyond our lifetimes.