The Long Game

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The Long Game describes the primacy of comprehensive long-term goals over short-term gains, pleasures and profits. It is shorthand for placing strategy above tactics, for building a championship team rather than focusing on winning the next game, for foregoing quick profits for future gains, for sacrificing mouthfeel indulgences in favor of a nutritional / fitness regime that delivers long-term health--in every case, devoting time every day to reaching goals that cannot be reached any other way.

A recent essay proposed that making progress on our long-term goals is the source of fulfillment and happiness, not actually reaching our goals: The Unintuitive Secret to Happiness: "Always Play the Long Game."

Playing The Long Game has a positive glow, for it carries the promise that the attention paid today to goals that can only come to fruition via daily effort and discipline will be rewarded. But these future rewards are not guaranteed. We can make the daily effort to reach long-term goals and come up empty.

The goals themselves may be revealed as more problematic than anticipated. The Green Revolution produced higher yields over shorter time spans as the solution to global hunger, a laudable goal, but the unintended consequences of this success are only now becoming apparent. By deploying hydrocarbon-based fertilizers and selecting seeds that grow and mature quickly producing abundant yields, we created a form of agriculture that sucks nutrients from the soil at a rate far higher than can be replaced.

The net result is the nutritive value of our food has been in steep decline since the Green Revolution replaced less efficient, lower-yields methods: Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed? This article mentions vegetables, but the same decline has been found in grains, dairy and meat.

This decline in nutritive density may be fueling the global obesity problem, as humans (like other animals) respond to nutrient deficiencies by eating more in an attempt to fill the deficiencies. This is explained in the book Eat Like The Animals: What Nature Teaches Us About the Science of Healthy Eating.

The conventional either-or in The Long Game is between the indulgences and pleasures to be had in the moment and the gains that can only be earned with sacrifices and a goal-driven vision of the future. There is truth in this either-or, but there's a far more illusive either-or that's invisible but consequential: choosing the wrong goal for The Long Game, as a result of being blind to the tradeoffs required to reach the goal and the unforeseen consequences of reaching that goal.