But those boundaries are useful fictions. The deeper you look, the more they dissolve. Fascinating, thought-provoking passage from @RichardFisher's brilliant book The Long View.

Your lineage is continuous with non-life. Think of your mother. Now her mother. Keep going back 3.9 billion years. At some point, there's no parent anymore. You're connected to abiotic matter. To the universe itself.

These traditions arrived at deep-time perspectives thousands of years before Western geology. @richardfisher explores this in The Long View. Long-mindedness comes in many forms, and our linear model of time may itself be incomplete.

My favorite: imagine throwing a wooden yoke into the ocean once a century. A kalpa is how long you'd wait before a one-eyed turtle surfaced exactly within the yoke's hole.

@richardfisher proposes a term for this in The Long View: the Pitch Drop Effect. The perception that the status quo will last forever, when actually it's evolving imperceptibly and could transform at any moment.

A physicist named John Mainstone spent decades trying to witness a single drop of pitch fall from a funnel. He missed it every time. And yet, he considered it the most important work of his life.

@richardfisher makes this case powerfully in The Long View. Our ability to see beyond the present moment is the engine behind every major civilizational achievement. The question is whether we're still using it.

A sheep can be trained to recognize Jake Gyllenhaal's face. Seriously. But it can't plan what it's doing tomorrow. That gap tells you everything about what makes human cognition special.

@richardfisher explores this in The Long View. Cousteau traded his wetsuit for a podium, and the cause he championed might have been his most important dive yet.

Jacques Cousteau is best known as a scuba pioneer, the real-life inspiration for Bill Murray's Steve Zissou. But toward the end of his life, he took on a very different expedition: political advocacy for people who don't exist yet.

@richardfisher calls this "the tyranny of targets" in The Long View. The goals were disastrous in what they excluded.

Goals are powerful because they narrow focus. That's also what makes them dangerous. The Ford Pinto is one of the most devastating examples of this in business history.

Arthur Kraft found that quarterly reporting leads companies to cut investments, reduce R&D, file fewer patents, and delay projects. By one estimate, this short-termism costs the 500 largest companies nearly $80 billion per year in foregone earnings.

Every three months, publicly traded companies make promises to the market. It seems routine. But research suggests this ritual is quietly reshaping how companies think, invest, and plan.

@richardfisher explores this in his excellent book, The Long View. We're not time-blind because we lack information. We're time-blind because the present is so loud it drowns everything else out.

There's a term for the era we're living in, and once you hear it, you can't unsee it: the "monstrous present." Historian François Hartog calls it "presentism," a temporal state where only the instant exists.

The gusset plates snapped because of physics. The bridge collapsed because of psychology. We consistently underweight outcomes that feel distant and overweight the comfort of doing nothing right now.

We're terrible at taking future consequences seriously. It might be the most dangerous cognitive bias we have. A bridge collapse in Minneapolis illustrates this perfectly.

This comes from @richardfisher's excellent book The Long View. Highly recommend. When Enlightenment thinkers first imagined the "abyss of time," they had no idea how deep it would turn out to be. And the vertigo of that discovery carried with it something unexpected: profound optimism.

Physicist James Jeans suggested human beings may be "creatures of the dawn" with unimaginable opportunities ahead. H.G. Wells wrote that all of human history so far forms "the prelude to the things that man has yet to do."

Pascal distinguished between curiosity (fickle, fleeting interest) and wonder (a more enduring disposition). When contemplating these extremes, curiosity changes into wonder.

"This whole visible world is only an imperceptible trace in the amplitude of nature." Blaise Pascal wrote that in the 17th century, then asked readers to consider a mite. Its tiny body has veins, blood, humors, drops, vapors.

The philosopher responds: "When the sky was only this blue vault with stars nailed to it, the universe seemed small. Now it seems I breathe more freely." Realizing the universe is huge can lead to horror. Or to freedom and cosmopolitan optimism.

"All philosophy is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight." Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle wrote that in 1686, as telescopes revealed Jupiter's moons but couldn't confirm alien life.

Take David Hume's billiard balls. You see a ball roll toward another. You assume it will strike that ball. You infer causation. But without having experienced similar collisions, you couldn't predict this. Causation isn't transparently observed.

Philosophy is born in wonder. Nicolas Malebranche picked up Descartes's Treatise on Man at a Paris bookstall in 1664. He was so head-over-heels that "the joy of learning caused palpitations of the heart so severe, he had to stop reading to breathe more easily."

Werner Herzog writes in The Future of Truth that if facts alone mattered, the phone book would be the book of books. Facts are inert. They shed no light. They give us no deeper understanding. They conceal as much as reveal.

A lama told Slater: "Most important is to spend a good human life. You get your precious body, but then"—he snapped his fingers—"it's gone. Do it now." The awareness isn't morbid. It's clarifying.

Kora means circumambulating a place without any goal of arrival or reward. You walk around a mountain, a lake, a monastery, or even along straight urban paths. The point isn't to get anywhere. The point is to pay attention. To stop and look at yourself too.

We tend to think of between-states as uncomfortable, something to move through quickly. But bardo suggests they're where awakening happens. The discomfort is the point. Transformation requires uncertainty.