Excerpts: “This Intertidal moment, in which our long-held norms and narratives are coming into question, can be the breeding ground for exponentially evolved human thinking and behavior. We can navigate this moment of chaos and build societies that relish human and ecological flourishing. But it’s not a foregone conclusion that we will” (p. 27).

“It took two hundred thousand years for our population to reach one billion, and only two hundred years to reach seven billion. That kind of growth might be all well and good if Earth itself was ever expanding, but it’s not” (p. 47-48).

“Empathy is different from compassion. Empathy is the ability to get beyond your ego and imagine how someone else feels. That doesn’t mean you would feel that way, too, or that you think they’re right to feel that way, just that you can imagine it” (p. 70).

“We’re recognizing that they operated in a psychological and social environment that was different from ours, and that no one has a monopoly on the perfected status of anything. Our ancestors, too, were raised by links on the chain going back centuries. Empathy for our ancestors requires humility and taking a nuanced approach, even as we see them clearly” (p. 71).

“As Ernest Becker wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, ‘Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with'” (p. 82).

“The point is, we have an ultimate aim or, to use the original Greek term, a telos. Telos ask one of the most fundamental questions of existence: ‘To what end?'” (p. 121).

“Trim tabs are not ways to bypass the work of truth, reconciliation, and transformation; they are ways to start doing the work of creating a better future self, community, organization, or society immediately so that broader systemic changes emerge alongside. It’s tweaking small pieces of our source code so that our default behavior algorithms work better across the board” (p. 131).

“Some might be entirely internal, like talking back to the voice in your head that has nothing postive to share” (p. 132).

Wallach, Ari. (2022). Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.