‘We human beings are just flashes of sunlight on a pond’

How often do you consider past or future generations in your day-to-day life? 18th century political thinker Edmund Burke saw society as 'a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.' In his absorbing and ultimately uplifting new book, The Long View, Richard Fisher argues that we have become entrenched in 'presentism', the issues of the here and now more prominent than ever.

Previous generations happily invested in multi-generational efforts, with fewer expectations to see the outcomes in their lifetime. Think grand cathedrals, Stonehenge or the Great Wall of China. Now, we get bogged down in quarterly reports, or the latest Twitter drama. And as research in the book shows, more often than not, this distracts us from the big picture. Fisher delves into cultural shifts and intrinsic biases that foster short-term thinking and brings an array of creative solutions. These include building a richer vocabulary around the future, which we currently describe in distant and nebulous terms, to reduce the disconnect with generations to come.

The Long View is well-researched and superbly written. It elides insights from a variety of cultures and disciplines and reveals how small actions in the here-and-now can go a long way. And it often fills you with awe and wonder. Did you know that you can see the Big Bang's afterglow through the 'cosmic microwave background'? Or that rock structures formed 60 million years apart sit side by side at Siccar Point on the Scottish coastline? Fisher explores what he calls 'temporal windows', tangible evidence of how far the Universe and our planet go, ready to get you thinking about humanity's place in the grand scheme of things.

It was life events – having a daughter, losing his father, grieving his stillborn son – which prompted Fisher to think deeper about the future of humanity and how our actions shape it. I can personally relate to the sense of purpose and surge of energy ignited by connecting with something larger than yourself at times of loss. It can be therapeutic. And, according to some longermist moral philosophy arguments, it's the right thing to do. Without neglecting immediate societal problems such as social inequality or homelessness, we need to secure a good future for the next generations and the environment, Fisher argues.

With the modern world amplifying our innate shortermist instincts, it's easy to lose perspective. In our interview, Fisher points to how long-term thinking can enrich our individual and collective lives and how we can harness it.

You studied geology at university. Did you think this was linked to a larger interest in the concept of time?

I've always been interested in rocks and what they represent, and it took me a bit of reflection to realise why. It was that fascination that the Earth is just so much older than us, and that we human beings are just flashes of sunlight on a pond, compared to the deep, its deep history.

That sense of feeling small within the face of something so much bigger has run throughout my career. The idea that you can hold a fossil in your hand that was from another era and lived its own life in such a different environment when the continents weren't even in the same places as they are now. Go to Castleton, Derbyshire and look at the limestone… that limestone used to be a warm, shallow tropical sea! It's an environment that doesn't exist at all now. The idea that there can be global change fascinated me. It led to thinking about time and how we perceive it.

How does your interest in geology align with your interest in the psychology of deep time, then?

I've always had an interest in what came before us. Not long after my daughter was born, in a sleep huddled, tired parents state, I started to think about her life, how long she might live and what kind of life might lie ahead for her. If she's lucky and if medicine continues to improve, and she has a good long life, she'll see the next century. She'll be 86 years old when the fireworks go off and the next century arrives. That reflection blew my mind. I started thinking about deep time going forwards and what impact we in the present are having on that. What kind of world are we going to leave behind for our children? Will it be a better world? How do we ensure that we avoid getting trapped in a time blinkered way? For me, thinking long-term starts with family, friends, generations and our relationship with one another.

Does long-term thinking have therapeutic benefits?

I'm not a mental health expert, but I can speak from experience. I've had a fortunate life in many ways, but there have been times when I've encountered loss – the death of my father, or, right in the middle of writing the book, our baby son died very suddenly, as a stillbirth, shortly before he was due to be born. That really threw me because in those moments, it feels like thinking about the long-term view was not going to help – you need to be in the present for your loved ones and deal with the crisis in front of you. There are moments in one's life when you need to be present minded.

But being in the operating theatre, holding my wife's hand during one of the worst moments of our lives, we also stepped into the past and talked about happy memories. We also looked ahead to the future and hoped for a better time. Stepping into the shoes of one's future self, or even somebody else who lives in the future, can increase empathy for them as individuals and give you the energy, perspective, and motivation to kind of get through the tough times to potentially arrive somewhere else.

The book contains an entire section on the psychology of time perception. What are some barriers to long-term thinking and how can we overcome them?

Certain inventions of culture can trap us in the present. A most well-known one is the so-called quarterly reporting in the business world, where company leaders must report to the markets every quarter. This is a relatively recent invention of capitalism, which dates back to the 1920s, with the New York Stock Exchange. It seemed benign at first and it took many decades for it to become fully embraced, but now it's the norm. This is a cultural invention of the industrial capitalist society that we live in. Data shows that company leaders are less likely to invest in long-term benefits for their organisation like R&D and infrastructure investment when they need to report to the market. They deliberately do things that can impair their long-term prospects.

We have created various targets that encourage people to just focus on the present. When you give people targets, they change their behaviour and take shortcuts, sometimes delivering the target and no more. Take the New York cab taxi effect: If it's raining in New York, it's hard to find a taxi. The taxi drivers could earn more money than they normally would by taking more short rides. But they have a target they need to hit for the day which they quickly hit, because everyone's taking cabs, and so they clock off early. That's one of the reasons why the cabs are hard to find, there are fewer on the road. Metrics can shape people's behaviour.

You mentioned that since the 1990s we've been stuck in some form of presentism. What has changed?

There's no simple answer as to why we're trapped in a short-term age. Some people would blame the neoliberal capitalism that emerged in the late 20th century and took hold, others would blame the rise of technology. It's hard not to look at our social media feeds and not wonder whether it's influencing how we think. As a journalist, I think a lot about how media is produced and how it shapes people's perceptions of the world. If you go back in time, say, 10 years, as I did once with the BBC News page, and look at the news stories of the day, how many of them had long term impact or truly mattered today?

That sense of being trapped in the today – the latest Twitter discourse or social media controversy – could be keeping us in the present. I'm trying to find ways to write, create, edit commission journalism that covers the longer-term trends. On a personal level, I'm trying to think about what my media diet looks like – is it long or short-term?

People often ask, are things getting worse? If you look at the headlines every day, and that's all the media that you consume is, it does feel like that. But when you look at long term trend data, it's true that some things are getting worse, and some things are urgent, for example, we need to act fast on climate change. But some other things haven't changed, or some things are getting better. For example, the global poverty reduction over the past few decades has been very successful. There are kind of positive trends that don't get reported because they happen very slowly. Working out how to cultivate your own media consumption to allow you to see those things is important.

What are some of the psychological biases and habits that influence long-term thinking?

As a species, we are fortunate that we can step out of the present. The ability to mentally time travel – to remember memories or to stitch them together to think about possible futures – is something that not many other creatures possess. There's evidence of birds like scrub jays hiding food to go back to later, or the notorious case of Santina, a chimp in a zoo in Sweden, who was found hiding rocks around his enclosure to throw them at visitors. He was making plans and when the zoo visitors came in, he would start chucking rocks at them. This is basic forward planning. But beyond these examples, it seems that human beings are quite unique in the animal kingdom for this ability.

However, there are all sorts of psychological habits which either discourage it or encourage forward thinking. These include the salience bias – the way that people make plans based on the loud, urgent, available distractions in front of them. If you spend all your time on Twitter and social media and you only read bad news, then you're going to think that things are getting worse, even if there are other indicators suggesting otherwise, for example in global poverty reduction or growing standards of living. What we put into our heads and absorb in our daily media can affect our short- or long-term view.

There is also construal level theory and psychological distancing. Psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Lieberman pointed out that we equate time with distance. When we talk about the future, we tend to use adjectives like far or distant. This equating distance with time tends to mean that when we think of the future, it seems like it's far away, somewhere over the horizon, in a foreign land. But of course, the future will arrive – our grandchildren could live in the same country or neighbourhood or even community as us. So this distancing effect makes it hard to imagine time outside the present, which is why I avoid using the words 'far' or 'distant' future. That's just one of many psychological biases in the book.

Are there languages whose vocabularies or grammar are more conducive to future thinking?

There's some tentative evidence of this. Behavioural economist Keith Chen did a big data analysis in 2013 comparing the difference between how different languages use grammar to talk about the future. There is the distinction between a 'weak' and a 'strong' future. In English, when you think about tomorrow's weather, you usually say 'it will rain tomorrow'. However, other languages encode that future tense in a different way. In German you would say 'tomorrow, it rains'. Mandarin is the same. It sounds like it's in the present tense, but it's the future. There's some tentative evidence that people who speak weak future languages are more likely to put money into savings or make healthier choices, just because the future seems closer.

However, a study based on the city of Murano in Italy, where German and Italian families live side by side in similar economic circumstances, go to the same schools etc., but have differences in weak and strong future languages found different attitudes towards savings and future oriented behaviour. German children were more likely, in a similar task to the marshmallow test, to delay their gratification. But it's hard to make any strong claims here based on the available data. Other artefacts could be at play.

- We are pulling together a collection of pieces from authors and psychologists on our relationship with time. If you have any ideas, please reach out on [email protected] or on Twitter @psychmag