The Bicycle in the Creek: Why Short-Termism Is Stifling Humanity’s Grandest Progress

My sixteen-year-old son recently found a broken bicycle at the bottom of a creek he passes on his way home from work. Its front wheel was flat and misaligned, the chain off, the gear mechanism dangling. Most people would have seen junk. He saw potential. He walked that broken bicycle the rest of the way home, carefully wiped it down, fixed the chain and gear, and began aligning the front tire. When he realized the inner tube was punctured, he went inside, looked up the model, ordered the part for overnight delivery, and the instant storms stopped this afternoon, he was back out there, gleefully finishing the bike. Soon, he was riding it around, just as he did his first bike when he was five.

If he ever thought, “I can’t do this,” he didn’t voice it. He’s one of those rare people who are convinced that everything is doable; we just haven’t found the person with the right perspective yet. And he’s sixteen. The kid kinda scares me.

His audacious spirit stands in stark contrast to a pervasive, insidious problem in our larger systems: “we don’t know what we don’t know,” which often becomes a convenient excuse for “we don’t know what we don’t want to know.” This isn’t just about individual excuses; it’s about a systemic block to larger-than-life progress. Our society often keeps its potential geniuses too busy clawing at staying alive to have time to think. The luxury of time to think, to truly explore, is denied to many, stifling humanity’s grandest ambitions.

Humanity’s capacity for groundbreaking, world-changing progress is increasingly stifled by a pervasive culture of short-termism in scientific funding and societal values, which rewards immediate achievement over long-gestating thought. A radical shift is demanded: from an economy of capitalism to an economy of hope, enabled by artificial intelligence and a universal payment system that truly values and enables profound intellectual discovery and human flourishing.

The “Excuse” of the Unknown: Why We Shy Away from Grand Challenges

It’s easy to make excuses. “I’m tired. I’m old. Someone else tried it and failed miserably.” And on and on. This human tendency to shy away from uncomfortable unknowns, from the truly speculative, is understandable on an individual level. But when it becomes institutionalized, it creates a formidable barrier to progress.

In the realm of scientific research, this manifests as a deep-seated risk aversion. Funding agencies, despite acknowledging that “scientific research requires taking risks,” often bemoan the difficulty of attracting “high-risk, high-return” projects. The standard expectation from major funders like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is often the submission of preliminary data demonstrating a high likelihood of success. This creates a Catch-22: truly novel, groundbreaking ideas, by their very nature, often lack preliminary data because they are exploring uncharted territory. They are deemed too “risky” to fund, even though they hold the greatest potential for transformative breakthroughs.

The incentives within academia further exacerbate this problem. Reward schemes for researchers often prioritize “effort”—demonstrated through safe, incremental, and easily publishable work—over genuine “risk-taking.” A failed project, even if it was a bold, necessary experiment, can be seen as evidence of sloth rather than a courageous undertaking. This pushes scientists to “play it safe,” focusing on projects that generate easily measurable outputs for grants and publications, rather than pursuing the audacious, long-term inquiries that could truly move science forward.

The Stifling Paradigm: Achievement Over Thought

This dynamic is part of a larger societal problem: This is not a society that rewards thinking. This is a society that rewards achievement. The person who achieves is seldom the person who had the original, world-changing thought.

Consider the stark contrast between Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford. Ford, the industrialist, achieved monumental success by mass-producing the automobile, making it accessible to millions. He was, and remains, immensely rewarded for his achievements. Tesla, on the other hand, was the mind behind many of the fundamental electrical systems and concepts that underpin our modern world, including alternating current. His ideas were revolutionary, but his life was often marked by financial struggle and a lack of recognition for his profound intellectual contributions. Ford achieved many things; Tesla, not so much, at least in his lifetime. The person who achieves is seldom the person who had the thought.

The time to think, to truly engage in deep intellectual exploration, has become a luxury. My own brain has its “on” and “off” moments. To be truly “on,” I need comfort. If I’m cold, my primary thought is how to warm up. If I am hungry, my primary thought is where I can find something to eat. If my phone is about to be cut off, my thought is about how to pay that bill. These basic survival needs hijack higher-level thought. I am almost certain that there are more geniuses among us than we will ever know, because our society keeps them too busy clawing to stay alive to have time to think. The tragedy is immense: world-changing thoughts, profound insights, and revolutionary ideas are likely born in the quiet moments before sleep, only to be completely forgotten by morning, lost to the relentless grind of survival.

True breakthroughs are not linear. Thinking requires stimulation – visiting museums, seeing new things, conversing with new people who also think. Yet, after a day of such stimulation, it may be months before a profound thought built on that experience crystallizes. “Progress is not demonstrated in a lab or models on a draft board. Progress is the ideas in a mind.” But the current funding system, fixated on “tangible progress,” demands immediate, measurable results. The person writing the check wants to see something. How do you fund a team of 100 people simultaneously working on 10 different concepts, each of which is likely to fail this time, but, under some form of re-concentration, might work five repetitions down the line? There is no guarantee to those who think, only to those who achieve.

Cultivating an Economy of Hope: Investing in Thought for the Next Century

This short-sighted, achievement-driven paradigm must change. We must embrace the philosophy embodied in the adage: “A wise man plants a tree under whose shade he knows he will never rest.” This is the spirit of long-term, selfless investment in the future, a commitment to cultivating knowledge and possibility for generations yet to come.

This requires a fundamental shift in our approach to funding science. We need “patient capital” – longer-term finance that understands that true breakthroughs may take years, even decades, to reach fruition. Philanthropic models, for instance, have a unique strength here, often able to fund high-risk, unproven research that federal agencies, constrained by political and public demands for immediate returns, cannot. These models can incentivize failure, recognizing that high returns are never achieved by 100% success; indeed, a true high-risk, high-reward program should “mandate that most of the investments turn out to be scientific failures” because failure is often the most potent teacher. This means protecting researchers’ livelihoods against the “vicissitudes of scientific chance” and weakening the disparity in prestige awarded for incremental versus groundbreaking outcomes.

We need people who think that if a team of 100 people works on a speculative concept, they “may achieve nothing within my lifetime, but they might change the world in the next.” This is the mindset of true progress. And to foster this, we need a society that values thinking for its own sake. “Perhaps we need a way to show that we know how to think. A way to show that we know how to think without being unfairly judged for thinking whatever it is that we think.” This means creating an environment where intellectual exploration is not just tolerated, but celebrated, regardless of immediate, measurable output.

The AI-Powered Liberation: A New Path to Human Flourishing

This vision, seemingly utopian, is closer than we think, and ironically, the very technology that some fear will displace us – Artificial Intelligence – could be the key to our liberation. There is a lot of fear of, “What do I do if AI takes all the jobs?” But we must stop. Reconsider.

What if AI takes all the jobs and leaves you time to think? What if AI takes all the jobs and leaves you time to play with and teach your grandchildren? What if AI takes all the jobs and leaves you time to explore? What if AI takes all the jobs and gives you a chance to chase a fantasy? What if AI takes all the jobs, and you’re finally able to sit with a therapist to reduce your mental strain? What if AI takes all the jobs, and you don’t have that heart attack that’s coming up in two months?

Granted, AI isn’t going to take every job (yet). But as it learns to do things – things that are rote, ordinary, repetitive, the very tasks that have for the past 100 years locked people in boxes for most of the day, taking away any joy or hope they might have in exchange for a meager check over two weeks – the people who used to do those mind-numbing things should be free to un-numb their minds, to learn once again to think of “impossible” things like they did when they were four years old.

This profound liberation requires a fundamental shift in our societal contract. We absolutely have to move away from a capitalistic mindset of hoarding wealth to maintaining fiscal health for all. A universal payment system, like Universal Basic Income (UBI), could provide the foundation for this. It would offer the security necessary for mental and physical well-being, allowing minds to be more open to the possibilities we never had time to consider before. I can almost guarantee you that within a decade, we would see significant rises in the number of new ideas coming from people who never knew they had an idea.

Cultivating the Future – A Call for Visionary Investment and a New Social Contract

The current short-term, achievement-focused paradigm is stifling humanity’s greatest potential, leaving countless world-changing thoughts uncultivated. We must shift our collective mindset from immediate gratification to long-term vision, from seeing only what’s tangible to valuing the nascent ideas in a mind.

This transformation requires a new social contract, where AI serves as a tool for human liberation, and a universal payment system provides the foundation for a society that rewards thought, exploration, and flourishing. We can change this. We have to change this. True progress is not a sprint to the next quarterly report; it is the planting of a tree under whose shade we may never rest, but whose fruits will nourish generations to come, illuminated by the quiet, sustained brilliance of those who are simply given the space to think.