Honestly, this article is so Medium.

1. N ways to X

2. Cognitive toolkit, Mental model, Ruleset, Guidelines,

3. “Oh humanity is selfish and has a short term view, we need to think long term and in unity boohoo”.

4. This is just PR for a book.

It feels like a highschooler read some "Think Like Elon Musk" brainporn and decided to write a pop-philosophy article without even thinking about it. After reading the article, I am sorry for those that waste money on this "interesting thinkers" book, because there seems to be nothing interesting or even thought out in this article. I assume TLDR of the whole book is "think about humanity in the long term and not just about yourself", which is exactly what isn't done here.

A lot of the "six drivers" overlap, short/long aren't "the counter" of each other but can actually work in synergy. If you can even call them drivers.

"Tyranny of the clock", no, we just have a social and technological standard enabling us to keep our distributed system in sync. We aren't doing field work all day, we're doing things that take minutes and hours, sometimes even second.

A lot of times, it isn't even technology that captures our attention in technology, it's other people or stories, and if it was 1538, people and stories would still capture each attention, they'd gossip, hang around, go to pubs, theaters, fire dances with the shaman, it was just localised and you were limited to your tribe/area. This brought as much good things as it brought bad things.

We focus on the next election because that is the way we fix the system, not by wishful thinking. Political corruption is a whole another sport that has nothing to do with this set of gloves, but we can also correlate it to age of the politicians, time when the system was established and the information scale at which average human operated at the time (let's say 100 years, my city/village scale). They are remnants of a legacy way of thinking, a way that will be seen as disgusting even by politicians in 50 years. Just like we look at guillotines in disgust.

The same "speculative capitalism" (lol) is what feeds innovation and growth, it's the same thing that enabled us to connect and achieve more, it's the same thing that raised our standards worldwide and made the world a better and safer place to live. The speculation is called investment and it enables long-term scaling and thinking. Yes, we spent the last 150 years destroying the planet in the name of economic growth, but it's also what got us out of the mud, connected to each other, learning more about nature and ourselves, noticing the damage we're doing and pivoting to correct it.

Of course we are "selfish", we have known for nothing but our tribe since the beginning of time, and we worked both to protect our unionized "self" (tribe) and our selfish (me, family, kids..) "self" against anything. For thousands of years we knew nothing but family pride and tribal pride, for the last 100ish years people really discovered national pride (we knew it before, but it wasn't that big of a pond or that concrete of a deal) and now we're just "discovering" global pride.

We have been long-term thinking since the start of humanity, except in a "selfish" way, and we just recently realised "oh wait there is a whole world out there", with the latest generations being the only ones born into that kind of world and growing up understanding that there are other, diverse people around the world and how their actions impact others.

For an article covering long-term thinking, it's a shame such short-term behavior (particulary last 50-100 years) is used to describe a whole civilisation.