Imagine driving an entire day on questionable roads and then navigating deep interior Texas in the remote Sierra Diablo mountain range to see a 200‑foot‑tall clock built to last 10,000 years.

That’s exactly what you might have to do to catch a glimpse of the Long Now Foundation’s bizarre time-keeping contraption. It is a clock designed with very slow timekeeping in mind (one tick per year, one chime per century, and a cuckoo emerging for a chirp only every millennium).

Its creators describe it as a ‘timeless’ clock that invites long‑term thinking. Danny Hillis, who envisioned and engineered the clock, puts it this way: “I wanted to slow down, stretch out, think on a different timescale.” Watch the video here.

Our world is designed to make us think in near-future terms.

“Short‑termism” shows up everywhere—from throwaway products to quarterly corporate goals. However, even in an age of instant gratification, we intuitively know that building enduring value beats chasing fleeting metrics—for the broader good.

But, why does the clock idea seem bizarre? The entire endeavor feels pointless. It is hard to wrap your head around the concept.

Perhaps it is because we are too short-sighted. It might be evolutionary. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to care about finding the day’s meal, the coming season, staying alive another day, and not much else. The immediate present mattered.

Today’s institutions and systems reinforce short‑term thinking through incentives and metrics. We are wired to constantly sacrifice long‑term exponential gains for the aforementioned instant gratification.

But by shifting our perspective to caring about what the next century might look like, we stand a chance of making decisions that shape a more resilient, future‑proof world. It could be as simple as trying to build things that last.

But how do you build something that lasts 10,000, or even 1,000 years? Most people I’ve talked to about this state wanting an enduring legacy as a common business or personal goal. However, when it comes down to planning and execution, we all invariably default to near term thinking.

I love this comment under the Long Now clock’s YouTube video (paraphrased): “When a thing’s primary purpose is to make you think or reflect, that thing is art.

Perhaps we ought to start thinking of our work as art. The focus then shifts from value or benefit to us (a self-serving approach), to creating something enduring and meaningful (a selfless approach).

For the broader good.

It might be what the clock’s artists were thinking; they don’t have too well-defined an expectation from the project, except to build a clock that lasts.

Our species has certainly done it before. Ancient civilizations have built elegant structures, durable roads, fantastic murals, and monuments that dot the world today, having lasted thousands of years.

There is plenty of evidence that many such civilizations valued craft and creativity, treating major buildings as art, not just infrastructure.

Modern urban roads, in comparison, can crumble within a few years of being laid. It’s not for lack of technology or material, but intention.

The Japanese company Kongo Gumi, widely cited as the oldest in the world, adopted a century-thinking approach focused on long-term sustainability over short-term gains and building incredibly durable wooden temples that would last centuries.

This isn’t just about infrastructure, though; it’s also about how we design our technologies. What would an AI platform built today on a hundred-year horizon look like?

Not a groundbreaking LLM that needs replacement or upgrades every week or month, but a piece of timeless technology that—and I’m spitballing here—multiple generations from now will find educational, entertaining, or transformational. Something that’s understandable and modifiable by future developers, built to preserve and transmit knowledge across time, not just answer questions in the moment.

Maybe asking AI about it could be a start? It might be something rudimentary like prompting the machine to only consider solutions that will endure and stand the test of time and stay relevant and valuable.

How might we adopt this mindset? What’s something you can do that only makes sense if you’re thinking ten, fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand years ahead? Pick one project you’re working on, and ask: what would I do differently if this had to matter at least three generations in the future?