There is a thought experiment that a philosopher named William MacAskill uses to introduce the idea of our obligation to future generations. It goes like this.

A hiker comes across broken glass on a remote trail. Nobody is around. Nobody is watching. The glass may have been there for years and may sit there for decades more without being disturbed. But one day, perhaps, a child will walk this trail barefoot. The glass will injure that child. The child does not yet exist and may never walk this particular path. Should the hiker pick up the glass?

Most people, when they sit with this question, say yes. Not because they will receive anything in return. Not because anyone will know they did it. But because something in the structure of the situation makes it clear that a decision taken today, requiring very little, will protect a future person they will never meet from harm they will never see.

That instinct, the willingness to decide for the benefit of a future person who cannot yet reciprocate, cannot yet even exist, is the foundation of what the research calls long view thinking. And it is, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Intergenerational Foresight handbook, one of the defining challenges of leadership in the twenty-first century. WEF

Most people do not take the long view. Not because they are selfish or short-sighted, most people are neither of those things. But because the structures of modern life are almost entirely organised around short-term incentives, and the cognitive machinery required to think seriously about the effects of present decisions on future people is demanding in a way that is rarely supported by the environment in which most decisions are made.

The hiker picks up the glass. But very few people, when it comes to the decisions that actually shape the future, how to invest, what to hold, what to build and what to pass forward, think with the same quality of attention they would bring to that trail.

Why We Are Biologically Bad at the Long View

The difficulty of long-view thinking is not a moral failing. It is, in large part, a cognitive one, built into the structure of how human attention and motivation work.

Research on intergenerational decisions consistently finds that people tend to prioritise the present and the near future in their prosocial and moral considerations. Benefits that will accrue to future generations are systematically discounted relative to equivalent benefits that accrue to the present generation. This is known as intergenerational discounting, and it is not a product of indifference to the future. It is a product of the specific difficulty of making real and vivid something that is, by definition, not yet real and not yet present. PMC / Scientific Reports

The child on the trail is abstract. The inconvenience of picking up the glass is immediate. The mind that evolved to prioritise immediate, concrete information over distant, abstract possibilities will systematically underweight the child’s interests relative to the present effort. This is not wickedness. It is cognition.

The research is equally detailed on what overcomes it. When the legacy motive is activated by promoting death awareness, feelings of responsibility toward future others, and the vivid imagination of future people as real and specific rather than abstract and statistical, intergenerational discounting is attenuated and people reliably act in ways that benefit future generations at some cost to their present comfort. ScienceDirect

The legacy motive, in other words, is the specific psychological mechanism that makes long view thinking possible. It is the capacity to feel genuinely responsible for a future you will not inhabit, for people you will not know, in conditions you cannot fully predict. And the people who develop this capacity most fully, who learn to make decisions with their effects on future generations as a genuine and vivid constraint rather than an abstract one, are the people who make the best decisions available.

The Specific Quality of Long View Thinking

Long view thinking is not simply thinking about the future. Everyone thinks about the future, in the sense of planning for it. It is thinking for a future that extends beyond the individual’s own interests and lifetime, a future inhabited by people who cannot yet advocate for themselves, cannot yet choose, and cannot yet be heard in any of the forums where the decisions that will shape their lives are being made.

Intergenerational foresight is about making better decisions today by thinking seriously about the long term. Credible leadership means taking responsibility for the future rather than treating it as distant or abstract. The capacity to think and act for the long term has become a defining challenge for leadership. Many of the structures that shape decision-making remain anchored in short-term incentives and narrow time horizons. WEF

What distinguishes long view thinking from ordinary future-orientation is a specific quality of inclusion. The long view thinker includes, in their decision-making, the interests of people who are not present at the decision, not because they are required to by law or by regulation, but because they genuinely feel the weight of those interests as a moral and personal constraint.

Some of the earliest institutional expressions of this quality of thinking came from indigenous communities. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, for example, operates under the principle of seventh generation stewardship, the requirement that every significant decision be evaluated for its effects on the people who will be living seven generations from now. This is not merely a policy principle. It is a specific practice of imagination, the deliberate cultivation of the capacity to feel the interests of people who do not yet exist as genuinely binding on present decisions. PMC / Scientific Reports

Seven generations from now is approximately 175 years. Most of the people alive today will not be born for another century. Their interests will be shaped by decisions being made right now; decisions about what to preserve and what to consume, what to steward and what to exhaust, what to pass forward intact and what to degrade in the service of present convenience.

Most of those decisions will be made without any serious thought about the people they affect.

What Makes Long View Thinking Possible for the Individual

The research on what enables individuals to think seriously about future generations identifies three specific conditions that make long view thinking possible in practice rather than merely aspirational.

The first is freedom from short-term urgency. The person who is managing immediate financial pressure, immediate professional demands, and immediate family needs does not have the cognitive or emotional bandwidth for serious intergenerational thinking. It is not a character failing. It is a capacity allocation problem. The luxury of the long view, and it is a luxury, in the most precise sense of that word, is the freedom from urgency that allows a person to think seriously about effects that will not manifest for decades.

The second is a specific object of concern. Abstract concern for future generations does not sustain long-view thinking as effectively as specific, concrete concern for a specific future person or a specific living thing. The hiker picks up the glass more readily when they imagine a specific child, their own grandchild, perhaps, rather than an abstract future person. The person who holds a specific ancient living thing in their name, in a real place, is more likely to think seriously about what condition it will be in when the next generation receives it than a person whose legacy thinking is purely financial and abstract.

The third is the experience of holding something that outlasts you. The person who holds an ancient olive tree that was here centuries before they were born and that will be here centuries after them is, through that specific holding, in a different relationship with time than the person whose holdings are all measured in financial cycles and quarterly returns. The tree does not care about financial cycles. It is operating on a timescale that makes quarterly returns irrelevant and seventh-generation stewardship feel not merely aspirational but specifically, practically real.

The Decision That Holds the Long View Most Completely

The most consequential long view decision available to an individual is not where to invest, or what to build, or how to structure an estate. Those decisions matter enormously. But they are all, in the end, financial decisions, optimised for value rather than for meaning, measured in returns rather than in the specific quality of what is passed forward.

The most consequential long view decision is what living thing to accept responsibility for. What specific, ancient, irreplaceable, biological reality to include in the circle of your moral concern, not because you will receive a financial return from it, but because it will still be there after you are gone, and its condition will reflect the quality of the decision you made today.

An ancient olive tree in a historic Greek grove is one of the most complete available answer to this question. It was here before you. It will be here after you. It produces something extraordinary from its own biological processes each year, olive oil that carries the specific character of the specific season in the specific landscape of a specific Greek grove, and that character reflects, with honest biological precision, the quality of the stewardship it has received.

The decision to hold it, to tend it, and to pass it forward in better condition than it was received is a long view decision in the most complete sense: made for a future person who cannot yet know you made it, about a living thing that will still be producing when the effects of today’s decision manifest in the oil that arrives at a table you will never sit at, in a year that has not yet been given a number.

That is the long view. Not the planning horizon of a financial instrument. The actual, biological, multigenerational timescale of an ancient living thing in a landscape that has been continuously cultivated since before the Renaissance.

For the foundational account of what a living legacy is and why the long view is central to it, the Living Legacy Guide provides the comprehensive framework. For the borrowing framework, the philosophical account of what it means to make decisions for people who are not yet born, We Do Not Inherit the Earth, We Borrow It From Tomorrow examines the question in full. For why the Great Wealth Transfer is fundamentally a long-view challenge rather than a financial one, The Great Wealth Transfer provides the research context. For the concept of continuity as the specific luxury that long-view decisions produce, Why the World’s Greatest Luxury Is Continuity provides the full account.

To explore what stewardship of an ancient Greek olive tree involves in practice, the Ownership page provides the full account. To begin a private conversation, the Contact page is the starting point.