Humans are very likely the only species that can imagine the very distant future. Unfortunately, our brains are not wired to behave in a way that optimizes this future. Most of us don't even save for retirement. Given the choice between eating a donut now and something healthier later, the donut almost always wins.

Individual decisions can have broad social consequences. If we are broke in retirement, we will be dependent on the public for help. If we get sick from too many donuts, we'll be less productive and deplete health care resources. But society as a whole is also prone to toxic short-termism.

Take climate change. Burning fossil fuels, clear-cutting forests, and mass-producing cows serve our immediate needs for lighting, farmland, and cheeseburgers, but at the cost of destroying the climate for many generations to come.

How many generations exactly? Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University, recently published a version of the following chart in "The Climate Brink," a Substack newsletter co-authored with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. He called it "the scariest conspiracy in the world": (Mark Gongloff)