The Long You

Making long-term thinking viable depends partly on rendering slow processes perceptible, compressing them onto a scale we can relate to more easily. Given that the quintessential long-now change processes (geology, deep culture etc) extend over many human lifetimes, a similar challenge is to make the passage of time more personal.

Here’s an addition to our Long Shorts gallery which does both of these things rather elegantly, using the simple but always interesting time-lapse approach. It’s a film by a New York-based photographer, Noah Kalina, who took a photo of himself every day for six years. The film, like the person, is a work in progress, as well as testimony to a formidable patience that evinces the kind of long-term thoughtfulness we’d like to see more often.

It also invites reflection on your own aging — for better or for worse…

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What is the long now?

The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.

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