I had my first experience with the long-termism diet at a dinner party where the host had nothing to serve except filtered water. Later, he took almost an hour to narrate how, in fact, this was the most ethical party he could host.
The reasoning is as follows: it is the moral duty of humanity to maximise the well-being of all future generations. They could be billions in number. They could have a lifespan of millions of years. Thus, all the resources we use in the present times are being robbed by someone who is yet to be born.
Longtermism by 2026 was no longer a niche philosophy but a lifestyle movement among a very small subgroup of individuals who could afford to care about the year 3026, having never cared about the next month. The followers started lowering the caloric levels to a minimum. One of the wellness influencers in Lahore said that she had given up eating and lived on energy resonance and lichen-based supplements, which grow at 14,000 feet. She was uploading videos every day at her farmhouse, where she was starting to look more and more transparent.
She would be the thankful mother of the children of 3026, she explained.
I went to a long-termist meeting in a gated community within Karachi. The invitation stated that the clothing should be made of biodegradable fibres and “no food, please; we are saving.” I came hungry, which proved to be befitting.
We were sitting on organic cotton cushions in a circle where a man with a well-groomed beard explained how he had eliminated the amount of food waste in his family by just not purchasing anything that anyone would want to eat. His wife smiled in a tight manner next to him.
Someone enquired about the children. Would not a limitation of nutrition at this time have an impact upon their growth? The bearded man took the matter into thought. He stated that the children of 3026 would be more developed if we saved a lot of resources today. He described his children as learning to appreciate scarcity. Summer had ceased to be a time for munching on Pakistan’s favourite fruit, mangoes.
I glanced around the room. All individuals there had health insurance. Each individual was a property owner. They were hoarding mangoes for the hypothetical creatures, even as real children in the city struggled to have a single meal each day.
Everyone, except perhaps the people in the practice, was aware of the hypocrisy. During the same week that I went to the fasting meeting, a long-termist think tank in London issued a report on the issue of maximising the allocation of resources across generations, which was funded by a billionaire who had flown into the meeting in a private jet. He was talking of sacrifice as he was having a steak that was labelled as being carbon neutral by buying it in the form of an offset with a company that he also owned.
Something was very thought-provoking about this type of meeting. You will quit avocado consumption due to its water footprint, yet you will not wonder why the agricultural labourers who cultivate it cannot afford to drink water. You cut individual consumption down to the performance level, but you do not mobilise others to bring structural change. You preserve mangoes till the year 3026, when you are feigning ignorance of the presence of the child outside your gate.
One humanitarian aid worker friend has simply described longtermism as people who have never been hungry discovering philosophy.
She is right. Hunger does not become abstract when you have felt it. It is not about making careful calculations concerning future generations. It means a mother choosing what children eat today or a father walking twelve kilometres to the food distribution point. It is a luxury to save resources now so that one can have money to spend in 3026 when he or she does not know how it feels to run out of resources right now.
I left long before the meeting ended and stopped at a roadside stand. Other than me, there was a security guard who had been out on a night shift, a woman carrying a child on her hip, and a young man who had been working on a construction site. We ate chickpea curry without saying anything. No philosophy. Nothing about the next generations. Just hunger, some money, and food that smelt, tasted, and looked the same.
I imagined the individuals on their organic cushions and how they will be saving mangoes for children who are not yet born. I imagined the kid in the stand and laughed with her mother. I questioned myself about which of these pictures the future would remember.
I guess I know.