Here is the full transcript and summary of Mara Luther’s talk titled “Why We Should Teach Our Children To Think Long-Term” at TEDxHieronymusPark conference.
In this TEDx talk, Mara Luther emphasizes the importance of teaching children to think long-term rather than focusing solely on short-term solutions. By doing so, we can create a-supportive and respectful mother-child relationship that promotes decision-making abilities and the ability to navigate through dangerous situations.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
There’s a phrase that never fails to focus me. And that phrase is Mom, I think something in the bathroom is on fire. I’m immediately arrested from whatever I was doing before and all of a sudden, all of my focus is on one thing. I want you to remember that phrase Mom, I think something in the bathroom is on fire.
Because we’re going to come back to that in a little bit. In order to talk about having farsight in a short-term world I thought we should probably define a couple things. So short-term thinking or short-termism is focusing on projects or investments that have an immediate objective often at the expense of long-term interests. So short-term thinking would lead to shoving toys under the bed instead of actually putting them where they belong.
Apologies to my nine-year-old for using her as an example on this one. Shoving toys under the bed might clear the space between the bed and the door and make it safer to walk. But when she needs a toy she’s just going to have to pull them all back out again and by then something might be broken.
Short-termism also led to my use of duct tape on the exterior of my groovy 74 Prowler camper. I was able to sleep dry while camping for a season but as the tape peeled away it became apparent that by avoiding the necessary maintenance I’d let another year’s moisture get into the wall.
I use myself as an example to illustrate possibly where my daughter gets some of her short-term thinking.
And I’m not even saying that all short-term solutions are bad. Sometimes we need that quick fix. There’s sandbags around your home would protect you from the flood. But I think the problem comes when we forget that short-term solutions are meant to be temporary. We sort of practice short-term solutions instead of practicing thoughtful long-term plans.
We don’t really stretch those long-term muscles very often. So that’s where I come to farsight which is just what I consider sort of extended forethought. I know it’s early in the day so I’m only going to define two things today.
But extended forethought. So forethought would be having an evacuation plan in place before an emergency occurs. Farsight might be designing a building to be safer from emergencies in the first place but farsight doesn’t stop there.
Once we start thinking of solutions farsight might lead us to using sustainable materials that the building lasts longer than maybe a cheaper material would last. Farsight might lead us to tackling societal and ecological imbalances that lead to the emergencies in the first place. It really builds on itself.
So if short-termism is my duct tape, farsight would be some kind of camper siding made of one-use plastic manufactured locally in a safe environment, giving people a living wage and also it’s biodegradable. And so when you put it into the earth it encourages nutrients to return to the soil. You see how it really grows on itself whereas short-term thinking stops after one solution.
Alright, so back to that focus arresting phrase. Mom, I think something in the bathroom is on fire. Now my nine-year-old has a prefrontal cortex that’s still under development. That little spot in her brain that helps her predict outcomes is still growing. And I am a big fan of the scientific method in most cases, but it means that she’s in constant experimentation for every single curiosity that she has. And that can be inconvenient in a roommate and also dangerous.
So when she wonders something like is this bench wobbly? I’ll just sit on it and rock back and forth to find out. How does the wall heater in the bathroom work? I’ll just shove bits of toilet paper in the vents to see how hot the little coils actually get.
Now to help protect her from innumerable ways she could hurt herself or burn down the house, I could reinstall all the baby locks, cover all the corners of the tables with little bumper pads or better yet retrofit my camper into a windowless doorless tower to just keep her in until that prefrontal cortex is nice and mature. But overprotection in this case would be a type of short-termism. It’s not actually reflective of the kind of parent that I want to be.
The truth is she will make mistakes and find herself in dangerous situations her entire life. So I want to teach her how to behave after mistakes are made and how to maybe see dangerous situations coming before she’s stuck in the middle of them. I also want my relationship with her to be built on respect and support so that maybe when she’s in high school and she makes a mistake she knows she can call me.
Here’s a good example of a vulnerable moment. Thanks, Brene. Maybe even after having this kind of relationship with her, the foresight might be that when she moves out into the world she treats people with respect and gives them a little bit of grace when they make mistakes.
If she chooses to be a parent she might take that kind of parenting into her own philosophy and build and enrich on that. Maybe she’ll design a wall heater that’s safer from curious minds. The truth is I just want to teach her, help her learn and be a safe place to come to when mistakes happen, preferably before there are flames coming out of the wall.
Now I’m a product of our short-termism society as much as the next person. When I’m stressed or overwhelmed I can only think about three hours into the future. So how was I able to find inspiration outside that inherited short-termism? Well, I give the entire credit to books and reading.
I’ve been a bookseller at Chapter One bookstore, an independent bookstore, for 18 years. And in that time I have been introduced to hundreds of characters and perspectives and ideas that are completely outside of my own experience. That’s how I’ve been able to stretch my empathy and to imagine things that I had never even considered before.
About a year ago, a customer came in asking me about a copy of The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Now it’s a popular historic novel and in part it’s about masons in the 12th century building a cathedral. The people who started the building of the cathedral would not necessarily ever be able to worship in it or even see a finished product. It might take generations to finish a big project like that. And that idea stuck in my head.
What would that be like? To start something knowing you would never see the result. To never even know if people liked it or used it. It rewired my brain. What would I do? What would I plant or build knowing that I would never see the end result? That’s when I started looking into futurism. Which sounds fake but it’s a real area of research.
The people that study the future are called futurists. And it sounds like we’ve wandered into the science fiction section. Futurists who study the future, this was completely outside of my cultural background. There are actually different cultures who are practiced at futuring but it was completely alien to me.
I had never grown up with the idea of the seven generational principle. That was introduced by the Haudenosaunee people or the Iroquois tribe. And their philosophy is that we should act now so that the people who are ahead of us, who are seven generations coming, have a safe, healthy, sustainable place to live. It’s pretty simple.
But if we were to apply it to some land management policy, I think it would possibly change our focus a little bit. And then it inspired me beyond ecology too. What if the kind of person I am in the world today could have a positive impact on the people who aren’t even here yet?
In his book, Long Path, Ari Wallach takes that question and then expands it and challenges social service organizations and non-profits to maybe consider what it would take to phase their services out.
What if a food bank planned for a future that they weren’t needed anymore, because they have been helping to build in their community some food security that would actually last beyond needing just a food bank to help out in those tough times? How would that change their spending? How would that change their focus to consider future community members as part of the community that they serve?
There are tons of groups out there doing the work right now. There’s another book called Be a Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric, and he talks about the future design movement in Japan. They have municipalities that invite people to come to their planning meetings and come as future citizens, to represent the people who will live in that city in the future. And they actually help with the planning.
A lot of the ideas and suggestions that they come up with are more progressive, specifically in environmental policy and health care. But that sounds like something that any city planning committee could slowly incorporate into how they think about the towns that they live in.
Mary Reynolds is a gardener and eco-advocate, and she saw two problems that she wanted to help tackle that were happening now but also are affecting our future generation. One is loss of biodiversity, and the other is the negative impact of a global food system. So she created a group called We Are the Ark, and she challenges property owners to give half of their property back to nature through regenerative methods and use the other half to grow their own food.
Despite what areas we find most interesting, there are people out there already doing the work that we could kind of jump in and help with. We don’t have to recreate any kind of wheels here. We just got to tune in.
I know that going from short-term thinking to farsight would take a major cultural shift. What I find hopeful is that major cultural shifts are happening all the time. I actually read some great news in the newspaper the other day, which is not something you always get to say. But just this month, the American Cancer Society announced that the cancer mortality rate has dropped 33% in 28 years.
Numbers vary around different kinds of cancer, and of course we still have huge discrepancies around health care for white patients and health care for patients of color. But what I found most hopeful were the factors that they listed. Two of them were scientific advancements like improved treatment and HPV vaccine, but two of them were a direct cause of culture shifts. One of those was earlier detection, and the other is a lower smoking rate.
Those are things that we all shifted. From 1991 to 2019, they estimated about 3.5 million lives were saved through these efforts, and we did that in one lifetime. Imagine what we could do in two or three or four lifetimes. The future is coming whether we plan for it or not.
We get to decide if we want that to be a place that’s desirable or not. I love a good dystopian novel as much as the next person, but our actual future doesn’t have to belong in that genre. It sounds like science fiction now, but a lot of the technology that we use started as fiction. You have to imagine it in order to build it. And we can be the visionaries that the future that’s coming needs, preferably before there are flames coming out of the walls.
Thank you.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Mara Luther’s talk, “Why We Should Teach Our Children To Think Long-Term,” revolves around the concept of fostering long-term thinking over short-term solutions in both personal and societal contexts. Here are the key points from her talk:
- Definition of Short-Termism: Luther defines short-termism as focusing on immediate goals at the expense of long-term interests, illustrated by personal anecdotes such as using duct tape for a quick fix instead of proper maintenance.
- Problems with Short-Term Solutions: While acknowledging the necessity of short-term solutions in certain situations, Luther stresses that these are meant to be temporary. She points out that continuous reliance on short-term solutions leads to neglect of long-term planning and foresight.
- Concept of Farsight: Luther introduces ‘farsight’ as extended forethought, which involves planning and designing with future implications in mind, such as using sustainable materials in construction or addressing societal and ecological issues proactively.
- Personal Anecdote and Parenting Philosophy: Luther relates her experiences with her daughter, emphasizing the importance of teaching children to foresee consequences and learn from mistakes rather than overprotecting them, which she views as a form of short-termism.
- Influence of Literature and Empathy: She credits her long-term thinking and empathy to her exposure to various perspectives through literature during her career as a bookseller.
- Inspiration from Historical and Cultural Examples: Luther discusses how the construction of cathedrals in the 12th century and the Haudenosaunee people’s seven-generational principle inspired her to think about the long-term impact of her actions.
- Futurism and Social Change: She explores the concept of futurism and mentions various social movements and initiatives that focus on long-term planning and sustainability, like the future design movement in Japan and Mary Reynolds’ eco-advocacy.
- Potential for Cultural Shifts: Luther is optimistic about the possibility of a major cultural shift towards long-term thinking, citing historical examples where such shifts have led to significant societal improvements, like the decline in cancer mortality rates due to cultural changes and scientific advancements.
- Vision for the Future: She concludes by encouraging the audience to be visionaries for the future, emphasizing that a desirable future requires imaginative and proactive planning, not just reactive measures.
Overall, Luther’s talk is a call to action to cultivate a mindset of long-term thinking and foresight in ourselves and future generations to create a sustainable and prosperous future.
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