Krznaric, Roman. _The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World_. New York: The Experiment, 2020. # Progressive Summary # Key Points # Miscellaneous I like his term for those who are trying to lay the foundations of a Long Now Civilisation: "time rebels". One study in Chicago showed that we think about the future 3 times as much as we do about the past. However, this forward thinking is heavily skewed towards the present: "The Chicago study showed that around 80 percent of thoughts relating to the future referred to the same or next day, with only 14 percent concerning over a year ahead and just 6 percent looking more than ten years into the future." # Quotes > The moment has come, especially for those living in wealthy nations, to recognize a disturbing truth: that we have colonized the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please. When Britain colonized Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it drew on a legal doctrine now known as terra nullius—“nobody’s land”—to justify its conquest and treat the indigenous population as if they didn’t exist or have any claims on the land. Today our societal attitude is one of tempus nullius: The future is seen as “nobody’s time,” an unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants. Like the distant realms of empire, it is ours for the taking. > This book offers foundations for creating a “long now civilization,” a civilization that has overcome its colonial mentality of enslaving future generations to the present.