Long-termism is usually sold as patience. I argue it is a cost problem: the price of protecting your own face is the better move you chose not to make.
Long-termism is usually sold as patience. I do not think patience is the part that actually costs you.
The hard part is that most of the moves that would get you there require you to risk looking foolish in front of somebody. Most people, most of the time, decline. I declined for years.
The price of protecting your face
is the better move
you chose not to make.
Start with the smallest version of it. A teacher asks a question you know the answer to. The room is quiet. You do not raise your hand. The teacher answers it themselves and the moment closes. Nothing measurable was lost, which is exactly why nobody counts it.
I call that the cost of face, and it is not opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the value of the second-best option you gave up. The cost of face is the value of the best option — the one you should have taken and did not, because you were afraid of the answer you might get.
A smaller and less dignified example. Ten shower heads in the dormitory, water off at eleven, a line at the door by ten thirty. Everyone waits outside while the people inside finish dressing. One night I walked in and asked a stranger whether I could take his shower head when he was done. He said yes. Five minutes I would otherwise have spent standing in a hallway, bought with one slightly awkward sentence.
Social psychology explains why that sentence felt expensive and was not. The spotlight effect: we badly overestimate how much attention we are getting. Self-serving bias and false uniqueness: we defend an image of ourselves that nobody else was holding. The audience I was managing did not exist.
Max Weber defined power as the ability to carry out your own will despite resistance. We usually picture the resistance as other people. More often it is our own fear of an answer we have not received yet — and when we give in to it, we hand back a power nobody took from us.
So the working definition I use is plain: long-termism is being willing to lose face on schedule. Ask the question, request the meeting, send the message, take the seat. Looking foolish is cheap, and you recover from it in a day. The move you did not make does not come back.
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.