Overcoming SHORT-termism

“Having a job is weird because we’re in the middle of a major extinction event.”

— deleted X (formerly Twitter) post (archive.org)

It’s hard enough for a human brain to think about saving for retirement 30 years in the future. Thinking on a geological time scale, it’s even harder to consider the impact of the current scientific discussion of whether we’re in the sixth extinction event. Still, I wanted to try to explain how overcoming “short-termism” in retirement is changing my own thought process around sustainability and climate change.

Short-termism

When studying retirement savings trends for a previous post, I learned of a term “short-termism” The classic example is that if a person is lucky enough to have money to spare, it may be wise to invest some of it for retirement. Short-termism describes overvaluing the short-term gratification of the potential vacation, clothing, or steak dinner that may lead someone not to invest.

This same argument can be applied to the sustainability impact of that vacation, clothing, or steak dinner. All of these activities (air travel, fast fashion, and eating meat) have a major impact on climate change, but the impact is over an even longer time period than the 30 years to retirement.

The longer time period invokes “temporal stresses” (with the acronym SHORT) that enable short-termism, as well as clues to overcome it.

Salience. We focus on recent, “salient” events rather than abstract concepts. It’s easier to think about the trip we got invited to go on, what we want to wear today, or what to eat tonight than the abstract concept of compound interest and its impact on our savings.

Habits. We have formed a “habit” of doom-scrolling on our phones for quick social media updates rather than to plan a new way to engage and live in the world. According to a survey by Reviews.org, the average American checks their phone 205 times per day, or almost once every 5 minutes while they’re awake.

Overload. We have “overloaded” our attention. Citing again Reviews.org, the average American spends up to 16 hours and 10 minutes per day across all of their screened devices combined.

Responsibility. It’s hard to hold ourselves “responsible” because the modern world abstracts us from consequences. I get to go to a grocery store to buy meat, and I don’t have to kill animals myself. I also don’t have to directly see the issues associated with industrial ranching practices, the meatpacking industry, or supply chain oligopolies.

Targets. Many of the “targets” or metrics we set for ourselves are for short-term performance. The typical example is of a technology company achieving excellent short-term sales results but failing in its long-term strategy. How do we reassess our targets so that they align with our long-term objectives?

My own short-termism changing

My retirement journey has helped me overcome some degree of short-termism as I look at the world in general.

Salience. My retirement period has been fraught with many previously abstract concepts that became salient issues that impacted our personal lives — a global pandemic, an attack on the Capitol, and even a rapid increase in interest rates resulting in bank failures. The world has changed my perspective on short-term thinking.

Habits. Stepping away from the routine of full-time work provided a great opportunity for me to change habits. I don’t wake up to commute to and from work, constantly check email and Slack, or rack up lots of business travel. It’s been refreshing to discover a different way to engage with the world.

Overload. I no longer think about operational issues typically associated with work, like project schedules, quarterly sales numbers, customer satisfaction metrics, compliance, and security vulnerabilities that require all the screen time. I feel like my mind has been freed from these types of things!

Responsibility. Living in a city has made me think a lot about responsibility. I’ve written before about how living among so much homelessness in Portland makes me feel that we must support the efforts of the cities and communities to face these problems rather than to simply retreat to the suburbs to avoid them.

Targets. The subtle shift for my retirement journey has been with “T”, as my retirement journey had to be full of setting longer-term targets, whether they be from a health, portfolio, or estate planning perspective. I’ve just had to think longer-term.

What about climate?

As such, I think the timing is right for me to address short-termism as it applies to sustainability and climate change.

Salience. Kicking off 2025, the LA wildfires are estimated to cost over $250B of economic losses. The conditions for this fire were created by weather events, including extreme heat the summer before, rainfall of at 4% of typical amounts during October and January, and strong and dry Santa Ana winds. The WEF Global Risks Report 2025 now lists “extreme weather events” as the top risk in 10 years. Climate is a salient issue.

Habits. Beyond policy, there are some big target areas for individuals to reduce carbon emissions, and I think Marsha and I are in a good position to do many of these by recognizing existing habits that contribute to the reduction of emissions and adopting new habits, at least to some degree:

• Diet (aka “Eat less meat”). According to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, meat and dairy products are responsible for 14.5% of all global emissions. Reducing portion sizes or frequency of eating meat can make a significant dent in the reduction of all emissions. What I share with Bill Gates is that burgers are one of my favorite foods, but I still eat them. Chronic disease and gout have imposed some limits on me for both portion sizes and frequency of eating meat to some degree. Still, I have some room to improve my habits here.
  

• Mobility. Transport is responsible for 21% of all global emissions. Air travel gets a lot of attention but only generates 11.6% of the emissions from transportation because only about 10% of the world flies in most years. This trend is changing as incomes rise. Still, we do quite a bit of air travel to see our kids, extended family, and friends, as evidenced by my TripIt account. Unlike many of our retired friends, we have NOT accumulated enough miles to have premium status on any airline, but there’s still some room for improvement here for us to reduce our air travel.
  
  Passenger vehicles are the largest segment, making up 45.1% of the emissions from transportation, which is why electric vehicles got so much attention in US federal policy. Personally, we’ve gone down to one car (a 2002 Audi TT ALMS), and, living in Portland, we walk almost everywhere. Once we decide to let go of our 22-year old Audi (it’s only got 100K miles!), I expect our next car will be electric or hybrid. I think our passenger vehicle road transport is well below the norm, and we’re likely doing our part in this dimension.
  

• Shelter and thermal comfort. Buildings account for about 30% of all global emissions, with a large portion going to thermal comfort. As such, there has been a lot of attention on building smaller homes, multifamily housing utilizing shared walls, and deployment of more efficient heat pumps. We left our lives of suburban living for a 2-bedroom / 2.5 bath condominium in a high-rise. And, it has energy-efficient, commercial HVAC (that’s a subject of a whole other Substack post!) I think we’re doing our part here.
  

• Fashion. On average, the fashion industry and its supply chain releases 10% of global emissions annually. A big problem is waste. Most clothing ends up in landfills, and when landfills are filled, the trash is incinerated to release the greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere. Some statistics: 25% of clothing waste is incinerated around the world. Only 8% of old clothes are reused and only 10% are recycled. 60% of new clothing materials are plastic.

  After looking in my closet, I think there’s room for improvement here on my side. I think I’ve purchased too many clothes over the years, and I believe I need to buy less in the future to get more life out of the clothes I already own. (Warning to friends: get ready to see some dated fashions on me as time goes on!)

Overload. I totally understand the overload issue, as it affects everyone. I just cited a bunch of statistics and articles I’ve read. Still, the good news is that I’m writing and you’re reading this Substack, so we’ve already made some progress here toward breaking through the noise!

Responsibility. From the standpoint of responsibility, it is true that the majority (75%-80%) of the reductions in emissions will come from policy, not individual or household actions. Still, the Project Drawdown estimate is that individuals and households have the potential to reduce about 25%-30% of the needed reductions in emissions. We can take at least some responsibility to take some individual actions, and we should.

Target. How much? The Paris Agreement called for greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Still, emissions haven’t peaked yet. In rejoining the Paris agreement, Biden agreed that the US would reduce emissions by 50%-52% by 2030, and just in December 2024 upped that to 61%-66% by 2035.

As a country, the US has a ways to go, and we’re behind.

Source: nrdc.org

However, with the understanding that we need to get there, we can encourage our legislators to work on the appropriate policy actions, and we can use the targets to inform and manage our own individual actions.

Next steps

I don’t believe that with the current targets, we are going to be able to stop the current extinction event underway. The current targets are designed to limit and not stop global warming. However, I do believe we have the opportunity to give the world more time to learn how to work together and live more sustainably. It would be great for us all to break down this SHORT acronym together for ourselves and agree to overcome our short-termism. Together, we might squeak out another 1-2 human lifetimes for the earth to figure this out even more! To me personally, it seems worth it to eat less meat and to look a little out-of-fashion to accomplish that!

What do you think?