Habeebullah🌱❤️

The concept of long-termism is rapidly eroding, and I find it quite troubling. Just the other day, someone suggested that poverty is evidence of stupidity, as though intelligence must necessarily translate into wealth, and wealth must arrive within a timeframe that satisfies public expectations. There is a growing intolerance for stillness, patience, delayed gratification and the ordinary, uneventful years in which people quietly build their lives. Everyone must be progressing visibly, earning spectacularly, travelling frequently or accumulating something worth displaying. No thanks to the entertainment and pop culture industries, which have helped normalise a distorted sense of time, where success is increasingly associated with youth, speed, consumption and spectacle. And I think the damage goes beyond our relationship with money. We are gradually losing the capacity to appreciate processes whose rewards are neither immediate nor publicly observable. A person building competence over ten years looks stagnant beside someone who becomes wealthy in six months, even when we know absolutely nothing about the sustainability of either outcome. We increasingly mistake visibility for progress, urgency for ambition and financial outcomes for intellectual merit. There is very little cultural patience left for the person who is still learning, still saving, still trying, or simply content with a life that does not require constant expansion. The tragedy is that even people who understand these distinctions intellectually are beginning to judge their own lives by the very timelines they know to be unreasonable.

One regret from my not-so-distant adult years is how often I apologised myself into accepting responsibility for things that were never mine to bear. The other person’s rage could be so overwhelming that I would summon every bit of emotional intelligence I had to calm them, even when doing so meant abandoning myself. I recognise the contradiction in asking someone consumed by anger to exercise restraint, but people really need to be kinder with their rage. Your anger may be justified, but the way you express it can still be deeply unfair. And someone choosing to de-escalate a conflict should never be mistaken for someone admitting guilt.