The Long Now, Pt. 1 - Tick-Tock
July 31, 2019·10 comments·Politics
We've reversed what time is for. Economic stimulus promises safety in the present while we're told the future is too uncertain to invest in. Political fear keeps us compliant today while we sacrifice tomorrow. The result is a system where we're constantly "investing" in right now and "living" in an anxiety about what comes next. The cost of this inversion isn't yet visible. But it's everything.
• The present gets stimulus, the future gets fear. Central banks and governments flood the now with money and messaging meant to calm immediate anxiety. Meanwhile, citizens are so consumed by future threats that they can't actually live in the present. This creates a permanent pressure, a constant buzz of dread that overrides everything else.
• We're told this is costless. The Nudging State and Nudging Oligarchy frame constant stimulus and constant fear as necessary, unavoidable, the only rational response. There Is No Alternative, they say. But this narrative hides what it actually costs us to stay perpetually managed and perpetually afraid.
• The inversion happens by design, not accident. It's not Big Brother imposing control through force. It's something more effective: institutions wrapping themselves in things we say we value (capitalism, diversity, the military, the stock market) while using those things to train us into myopia and compliance.
• Mortality clarifies what this does to us. When someone faces the reality of their own finite time or loses someone close, the priorities suddenly shift. What seemed urgent (the next stimulus, the next news cycle) becomes irrelevant. What seemed optional (time with people, real investment in what lasts) becomes everything.
• The alternative isn't offered because acknowledging it would unravel the system. If we stopped treating the present as the only thing that matters and the future as something to fear, if we reclaimed our willingness to take real risk and make real choices, what happens to the management mechanisms that depend on our compliance?
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Comments
You’ve given me a great desire to read the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCKRI2wEw7I
Great writing, Ben.
And thank you for sharing the story about your father. Thankfully that is a day I have not yet had to fully experience; I cannot imagine how painful it will be.
Provoking piece. Thanks Ben and kudos to your personal courage in sharing the story about your father.
Brought a tear to my eye. My father has also gone early and as a late-starting dad there is lots of missed conversations I can no longer have about raising my little cubs.
Tick-tock.
Amen! Your story moved me…my Dad is struggling with his health and asking for time. Time which I haven’t been giving.
Tick-tock.
Here is one of my favorite clips…the tag line is “Get busy living or get busy dying”. The now is for living.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GwJbrMghQ
My Mom passed away almost 20 years ago. I was going to visit her in the hospital that night, but that I-banking pitch book wasn’t going to make itself. Still regret it. Priorities.
Yep. I know EXACTLY how you feel, Rob.
Thanks Ben. In the summer of 2004, I was home from university and my dad had a mini-stroke. To see this cornell-educated-hyper-active self-employed, self-righteous man reduced to a leg-dragging, half-word mumbling flesh suit in a matter of minutes was… a life altering taste of the “threat of the future”. My ripe, young 21 y.o. heart remembers the constiction in my central nervous system as I waited in the E.R.
He survived. I’m 35 now, and not nearly far along enough as I would have been if he had passed. You took his death and decided you were gonna leave your mark on this world. Thank you for that, and thank you for not folding. Many would have in that situation.
I would go clamming every Sat with my late father-in-law until the day he passed when I decided to watch college football with a friend in the city. Wondered for a long time if he wouldn’t have had a massive heart attack if I had carried the clams up to the barn. Years later, we came to find that it was actually agent orange disease that got him. I live in Europe now and have been unable to see my own father in a year. The ‘$600 ticket’ is now the CV19 risk (to him and me) and quarantine. Can I afford it? Strange times indeed…
BTW - I am an ET Premium member but can’t download the Long Now - need to be Pro rather than Premium? oh I’ll just scroll…
I know exactly what you mean about CV19 risk as the new “$600 ticket”. Well put.
On the download, you should absolutely be able to access this PDF. Sometimes won’t work on mobile devices, though. Email us at info@epsilontheory.com and we’ll figure it out.
I keep revisiting that note every few months and of course the birth of our child has, as you mention here, gotten the point more across than anything ever before. Another canceled holiday, another canceled family gathering.
Neither of our parents have met the baby. In summer it will be three years since I last saw my grandmother who raised me. She’s 82 this year and thousands of miles away just like the rest of our families. COVID travel restrictions. Traveling with an unvaccinated baby. At first, I was patient, but now I feel like I’m running out of time, moment by moment. Tick tock.
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