Values, Time Horizons, and Social Technologies

All Values, such as Honesty, Respect, and Sustainability, are investments: they come with short-term costs and long-term benefits.

They represent a belief that it is worth forgoing some type of short-term opportunity because it would come with long-term costs or that it is worth paying some investment today to get a future payoff.

Because all Values come with short-term costs and long-term benefits, they only make sense over long enough time horizons.

Hence, only people with long enough time horizons practice them consistently.

Of course, there are exceptions to the above: habits, peer pressure, and fear of punishment. Still, the point remains: time horizons have a massive influence on the practice of Values, for the longer the time horizon, the more sense it makes to practice the Value.

Arbitrarily-shortened time horizons

A common mistake in investing is to arbitrarily shorten your time horizon. For example, you might have 50 years to live, yet say that your time horizon is “5 to 7 years.” This is bad because it makes you take more risks than optimal (because they seem to have less time to manifest) and will make you underestimate compounding properties (for the same reason).

I see a similar mistake with “digital nomads” touring towns one after another, looking for one to commit to settling to. The problem is that if you think you’ll only stay in a town for three months, you won’t do things like building friendships with local communities that are key to enjoying a town. Arbitrarily shortening one’s time horizon might get in the way of exhibiting the Values that make life great.

Similarly, we often shoot ourselves in the foot when we wait until a romantic relationship is great to commit, whereas some level of commitment would be necessary for the Values that make a relationship great to emerge.

Lengthening time horizons

Marriage is a social technology to increase the time horizon of a commitment to make certain Values more likely to be practiced, such as Fidelity, Honest Communication, Mutual Growth, etc.

Similarly, it makes sense to ask ourselves, how can we lengthen time horizons to make Values more worthwhile?

What social technologies can we introduce for this purpose?