Announcing: The ‘Essays on Longtermism’ Competition , Essays on longtermism.
PRESENT ACTION FOR THE DISTANT FUTURE:
MY LIFE IN SERVICE.
I sometimes imagine myself as a bridge—a narrow but sturdy structure spanning two shores: one shore is my own past and present, the other shore is the distant future, long after I am gone. The arc of that bridge is shaped by the actions I take now, in each day of my youth, my mentoring, my work with Young Life org and Kenya Red Cross Society, my civil engineering studies. In writing this essay, I attempt to trace how I came to inhabit that bridge, and how one chapter—“The Case for Strong Longtermism” by Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill—resonates with, strengthens, challenges, and reframes my own life’s commitments.
I begin with a brief recollection of who I am and how I came into community service; then I turn to how the worldview of strong longtermism refracts, deepens, and sometimes unsettles my sense of purpose; then I reflect on the tensions, the obstacles, and the paths forward. In doing so I hope to show that present action for the distant future is not just an abstract ideal, but something lived, messy, and human.
1. Origins: The Seed of Service.
I was born in a coastal town in Kenya (Mombasa County).Where the tides and the sea have always whispered to me of vastness, possibility, and continuity. From my earliest memories, service was woven into my life. My parents often embraced the ethic of “you are not alive only for yourself,” urging me to help neighbours, share in the burdens of community, offer my hand where needed. But it was in my late adolescence days in High school, and early youthful days, at the University, that the impulse to lead and mentor sharpened.
In my university days, I joined Young Life org (a youth mentoring and discipleship organization). At first I volunteered simply because I had space in my weekly schedule, and because I liked spending time with teenagers and my fellow peers—listening to their stories, helping them with schoolwork, offering a sympathetic ear for teenage heartbreaks. But soon I found myself being asked to lead small groups, to plan outreach events, (Campaigner`s camps, Bible outreach events etc.) to mentor younger students. In those roles, I felt a strange alchemy at work: I gave time, presence, encouragement, and I watched seeds of confidence, hope, sometimes and transformation, grow in others.
Later, I joined the Red Cross Society in our county (Mombasa). The Kenya Red Cross Society gave me exposure to crises: flood victims, displaced families, health campaigns, first aid training. I learned logistics, emergency planning, empathy under duress, but most of all I learned that small acts—teaching someone to clean a wound, connecting a family with aid, organizing and participating in health and Blood Donation camps, Disseminating the public about Red cross policies —can ripple outward in unexpected ways.
All along, I was also studying civil engineering: structures, materials, hydraulics, and project management. That field feels deeply appropriate to me: as an engineer, one builds for durability, stability, for use over decades or centuries. Bridges, roads, water channels—these are legacy works. They invite you to think not only of the immediate utility for the people alive now, but of the generations who will walk them, drink from the water, maintain them. In choosing civil engineering, I tacitly accepted a kind of a long view.
Yet in youth leadership and mentoring at Young Life org, and in Red Cross Society work and community education, I was living in the immediacy of lives: the teenager in crisis, the student who fails, the family without clean water. The tension between the urgent now and the distant horizon always tugged.
By the time I completed my university course, I perceived that my calling was to combine leadership, mentorship, technical expertise, and moral vision. I did not yet know “longtermism” (in its formal philosophical articulation), but I carried a small hope: that the value of what I do now is not just in what I see, but in what I set in motion.
2. Encountering Strong Longtermism: A Reorientation.
When I first encountered “The Case for Strong Longtermism”, I was struck by its boldness. Greaves and MacAskill argue not merely that future generations matter, but that the impact of our actions on the far future should be the most important feature of our moral reasoning (i.e. strong long termism https://www.globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Case-for-Strong-Longtermism-GPI-Working-Paper-June-2021-2-2.pdf. Reading their argument felt like discovering a new lens—not to replace my commitments, but to impose on them a wider, more demanding frame. Here is how I came to see the import of their ideas:
2.1 The Vastness of the Future and My Place in It.
Greaves and MacAskill begin with a striking observation: humanity may persist for tens of thousands, millions, even billions of years; even with conservative assumptions, the expected number of future lives is enormous. https://www.globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Case-for-Strong-Longtermism-GPI-Working-Paper-June-2021-2-2.pdf. In their words, “If humanity’s saga were a novel, we would be on the very first page.” https://search2.ucl.ac.uk/s/search.html?query=The+case+for+strong+longtermism&collection=ucl-discovery. That image haunted me. It made my youth leadership and mentoring work feel at once more precious and more fragile. Precious, because if even a few of those young people I mentored become responsible, compassionate adults, their influence may propagate for decades. Fragile, because many of the choices we make (in infrastructure, in institution-building, in culture, in values) risk degrading the capacity of future generations to thrive.
I found that strong longtermism asked me to reframe my sense of agency. I am not just a person operating in my local community; I am a node in a chain of human flourishing that might extend far beyond my reach. So when I tutor a teenager how to study the Bible, or help a young leader find confidence, I can situate that act within a horizon of centuries: “If this young person becomes a wise leader, yields value, resists corruption”—then that effect might echo.
2.2 Axiological and Deontic Claims: Value and Duty.
Greaves & MacAskill distinguish between axiological strong longtermism (ASL) — the claim that the far-future impacts are the most important component of value in decision-making — and deontic strong longtermism (DSL) — the claim that we ought to act so as to benefit the far future. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pvD57QQSCaFWRRK95/paper-summary-the-case-for-strong-longtermism-hilary-greaves .Their argument is: because the future may be huge, small changes in trajectory may accumulate into enormous value. Hence, in many decision contexts, the morally best actions are those that shape the far future. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/global-priorities-institute. This perspective enriched my moral thinking. Before, I often weighed “impact now vs cost now,” e.g. how many youths I can mentor this season vs how much effort I can expend. Now I ask: “Which of my possible actions will more robustly steer things in trajectories that respect dignity, capacity, justice, so that centuries from now the society is better off?” In many decisions (studying civil engineering, committing to community institutions, building trust, and cultivating resilience) the axiological weight of far future outcomes may tip the balance.
But DSL also confronts me: if far-future effects dominate, then present sacrifices are morally justified even when they yield little visible reward. It demands humility: I can’t always see the fruit in my lifetime, but duty may still call me to plant.
2.3 Objections, Uncertainty, and Cluelessness.
One immediate worry: how can I possibly influence the far future in a predictable way? The far future is uncertain, chaotic, and contingent. Greaves & MacAskill confront this via the “cluelessness” objection: perhaps we are epistemically blind to the long-run consequences of our actions. They break it down into types (simple cluelessness, imprecision, arbitrariness, etc.) and argue that while uncertainty is real, it does not defeat the case for strong longtermism. https://www.globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Case-for-Strong-Longtermism-GPI-Working-Paper-June-2021-2-2.pdf. Yet I feel that as a young community leader and future engineer, I must always wrestle with epistemic humility. I cannot assume that my predictions will hold. So I interpret their argument more modestly: strong long termism does not demand overconfidence; it asks for prudence, robust interventions, option-building, and humility about error.
Another objection is the risk of fanaticism — putting all one’s moral weight on tiny probabilities of enormous far-future gains, at the expense of near-term suffering or neglect of immediate human needs. Greaves & MacAskill respond that fanaticism is not obviously indefensible, and sometimes the morally significant stakes justify taking small-probability bets. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/global-priorities-institute. But they acknowledge this is a delicate point. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MhkaXq33jaMQyk3KH/the-case-for-strong-longtermism-june-2021-update. When I reflect on my work with Young Life org and Red Cross Society, I see that I balance these tensions already: I attend urgent human needs (e.g. food security, mental health, emergency relief) while also investing in leadership, values, sustainable infrastructure, and long-term resilience. I think that the integration of near-term service and longtermist orientation is not a contradiction, but a dialectic.
In sum: encountering strong long termism did not displace my commitments; it broadened their moral frame, deepened their demands, and compelled me to ask harder questions about foresight, humility, and impact.
3. My Journey as a Mentor, Leader, and Builder: “Present Action” in Practice.
I now turn to more concrete episodes in my life, in which I confronted the tension between present action and distant horizon, and how the longtermist lens helped me clarify, reorient, or sometimes doubt my own choices.
3.1 Mentoring Teens: Planting Seeds beyond Harvest
One defining line of work has been mentoring teenagers—many of them struggling with identity, despair, insecurity, absent role models. For each of them, I would often begin with simple conversations: “What do you dream of? “ What scares you? What would you like to become? ”.
There was one young man, call him Samson, who came from a humble and broken home. He often skipped class, fought with peers, and said he saw no future for himself beyond menial work. Over two years of weekly mentoring, we walked together, we did Bible Study session together, we prayed together, At one point, he dropped out of my mentoring program for sometimes; I feared I had failed. But years later, he re-joined and told me he had decided to join back my mentorship now as a reformed person. Now as I write this, he is now mentoring young teenagers and peers about his story.
That outcome feels modest. It is not sensational. But through the lens of strong longtermism, I see it as part of a long causal thread: if Samson becomes an ethical, productive leader, he may influence dozens, hundreds, even generations in his community. The value of that potential is much greater than the small cost of time and energy I invested. This reframes what “impact” is: not only how many I mentor in the next six months, but how many might be transformed decades downstream.
Yet the longtermist lens also warns me of hubris: I do not know for sure how Samson will be, or that he will influence others positively. The uncertain tail looms. So I try to structure my mentoring in resilient ways: helping him build habits, social networks, institutional connections, humility and adaptability. I try to teach more than content: teaching values, epistemic humility, and ability to respond to failure. I hope to build options for him, not rigid paths.
Moreover, strong longtermism invites me to think: are there systematic changes I can effect so that mentoring is not only ad hoc but scalable and resilient? Can I train, support, and network other mentors? Can I contribute to institutional structures—school policies, youth leadership academies, local governance—that persist beyond me? These are higher-leverage strategies.
3.2 Infrastructure and Community Engineering: Building Durable Foundations.
In my civil engineering studies while at Industrial Based Learning program, I encountered a powerful metaphor: when building, you establish foundations, choose materials, design for durability, and plan for future maintenance. The engineer’s imagination must stretch over decades, not just months. This professional sensibility dovetailed with the longtermist ethic. If I build a water system, a road, a drainage canal, or a community structure of whatever kind, I aim to think: will it serve the next generation? Will it be resilient in climate shifts? Will it promote equitable access? Will it lock in patterns of inequality, or will it nurture capacity?
In one project, we designed a small sanitation system at the heart of Mombasa at Buxton point housing project. We proposed not just immediate solutions but phased upgrades, potential expansions, modular designs, maintenance training for locals. My supervisor pressed my team to think two generations ahead. Not everyone was enthusiastic; many preferred simpler short-term fixes. But I insisted: what we build now is a choice about the kind of future we leave. The longtermist perspective strengthened my resolve to prioritize modular, upgradeable, maintainable designs even if costlier in the short run.
Simultaneously, my youth leadership and mentoring work taught me that technical infrastructures without social infrastructure are brittle. A well-built water system can fail if users are not involved, if maintenance culture is absent, or if governance is weak. Thus, I always try to tie engineering projects to youth training: teaching young people to maintain, manage, govern, finance. In that way, technical and social capacity are co-developed. The present social investments protect the distant value of the built infrastructure.
Thus the bridge metaphor returns: I build the physical supports of the bridge, and I cultivate the community on both shores to sustain it. Sometimes the stones shift; I have to repair. But I act with the belief that a robust, integrated foundation is being laid for futures I may not live to see.
3.3 Institutionalizing Youth Service: Toward Enduring Communities.
One insight from discovering strong longtermism was how fragile localized volunteer efforts are if not embedded in institutions. A youth mentoring group runs as long as the motivators, funding, leaders persist. But institutions—schools, local NGOs, youth leadership networks—can endure beyond individual lifetimes.
So I have increasingly oriented some of my efforts toward institutional capacity-building: training assistant mentors, codifying curricula, building local partnerships, trying to secure modest endowments or revenue models, documenting processes, fostering local ownership. I view this effort as key in translating present action into durable future influence.
Here I sometimes feel I run against inertia: some mentors prefer freedom over formalization; some funders prefer short-term metrics. But I recall a principle in strong longtermism: because the far future matters so much, it is often worth taking the risk of today’s institutional investment, even if benefits are uncertain or slow to bear fruit. (This is analogous to betting small on shaping trajectories.)
In one case, I tried to launch a Christian neighbourhood fellowship. The challenge was that after the founding cohort, momentum slowed, resources dwindled, and leadership turnover threatened continuity. I worried we would lose all progress. But by training mid-level leaders, embedding the fellowship with the community and in local school systems, creating feedback loops, and preparing a “transition plan” for leadership succession, we gradually built resilience. Today the neighbourhood fellowships continues, albeit not flawlessly, and is beginning to produce ripple effects in neighbouring villages.
I see that those institutional seeds, if watered slowly and prudently, may yield far more than my own short-term mentoring could.
4. Tensions, Doubts, and Moral Hard Edges.
The longtermist orientation, as powerful as it is, forces me to confront several tensions, doubts, and potential conflicts. I present here some of the sharp edges I live with.
4.1 The Danger of Neglecting the Urgent Now.
One potential mistake is to neglect pressing human suffering in the name of the far future. If I always deferred to long-horizon value, I might under invest in basic health, mental health, and immediate vulnerability. That would be morally questionable. Critics of strong longtermism sometimes worry that it leads to side lining the near-term. https://medium.com/curious/against-strong-longtermism-a-response-to-greaves-and-macaskill-cb4bb9681982
I respond by insisting on balance: near-term needs are real and urgent; we ought not to ignore them. But the longtermist lens asks: among near-term interventions, which ones also support better trajectories? Prioritize those whose near-term effects align with long-term resilience. In other words, choose interventions that are robustly good — good in many plausible futures. This echoes a methodological lesson in longtermist thinking: use robust strategies, option-building, learning, and avoid irreversible harm. (MacAskill’s and other longtermist voices emphasize doing robustly good things and building optionality).
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/wp-content/uploads/Longtermism-syllabus-MCMP.pdf. Thus in mentoring, I do not ignore the teenager in crisis: I intervene, comfort, support. But I also train abilities (resilience, critical thinking, and moral discernment) that may protect against future dangers. In infrastructure, I may prioritize the safe immediate intervention (e.g. clean water), but embed in it designs that allow adaptation to climate change.
4.2 Uncertainty, Risk of Misguidance, and Humility.
I sometimes feel a tremor of humility: perhaps many of my best-laid interventions are misguided; perhaps forgotten social trends, political shifts, climate disasters, pandemics, conflict will erase or corrupt them.
Here the longtermist frame is not a demand for certainty, but a guide to prudence under uncertainty. I should aim to build flexibility, redundancy, local ownership, feedback loops, and adaptiveness. I should monitor impact, course-correct, learn. I must remain epistemically modest.
Also, the possibility of overconfidence in trajectory-shaping looms as a danger. I must constantly ask: am I overestimating my ability to shape the distant future? Am I ignoring hidden dependencies or fragile points? Am I being paternalistic rather than enabling? These checks guard against unintended, counterproductive consequences.
4.3 Moral Sacrifice, Burnout, and the Burden of Long Horizons.
Strong longtermism imposes moral pressure. If far-future effects dominate, then many sacrifices look comparatively small. But people have limits of will, stamina, relationships, health, family obligations. The tension between demanding ethical horizons and the finitude of personal life is real.
I have felt burn-out: nights when I wonder whether the time I spend mentoring, organizing, drafting plans, is worth the strain on sleep, family, studies. Sometimes local critics say: “Why spend time on distant visions? Focus on what you can see now.” And I hear them—there is wisdom in proximate care.
To live well under the longtermist orientation, I try to cultivate resilience: rest, reflection, community, shared burdens, delegation, reminding myself that I am part of a network of effort, not isolated. I try not to carry the world on my shoulders alone. I also recognize that some proportion of “inevitable incompleteness” is acceptable: I cannot complete all worthy work.
4.4 Conflicting Futures and Value Pluralism.
Another complexity: what future do I aim for? Whose vision of flourishing? The future is contested; there may be multiple, conflicting ideals. Is it better to aim for stable communities, or ambitious expansion; is equity prioritized over growth; what trade-offs among technologies, culture, and ecosystem? Longtermist reasoning often uses aggregation (many future lives) and assumes moral symmetry across persons over time. But I sense that pluralism, local values, cultural integrity all matter.
Thus, when mentoring or building infrastructure, I must remain attentive to local voices, not simply impose some abstract universal long-term ideal. I need to connect longtermist ambition with grounded justice, with humility about cultural diversity, with respecting autonomy, tradition, identity.
5. A Vision Forward: Present Action for the Distant Future, in My Life.
As I look ahead, I try to sketch what “present action for the distant future” means concretely for me, in the coming years of my life and service. Here are some principles and projects I aim to live by.
5.1 Career as Mission: Engineering, Leadership, and Moral Impact.
I commit to using my civil engineering career not merely to build infrastructure, but to build equitable, sustainable, resilient, human-centred systems. I will seek opportunities in water systems, climate adaptation, disaster resilience—fields where the infrastructure of today deeply influences the living conditions of a hundred years hence. I will resist short-sighted funding cycles, and try to embed long-run maintenance, local capacity, and climate contingencies.
Moreover, I will integrate leadership and mentorship with technical work: recruiting Volunteers, training community youth to maintain systems, embedding social feedback loops. The technical and social cannot be separated if one values durability and justice.
I will occasionally take risks—projects with uncertain payoff but high leverage potential. I will test new models of youth-engineering collaboration, co-designing small prototypes with local youth. Some will fail; that is part of the journey. But failure with learning is better than safe stagnation.
5.2 Building a Youth Leadership Ecosystem.
I envision over the next decade in helping to build a youth leadership ecosystem in my region: a network of mentors, peer groups, youth innovation hubs, governance training, and community service pipelines. The idea is not that I personally mentor all, but that I seed and support institutions and distributed capacity so that leadership and moral agency propagate.
I foresee training “mentor-teachers,” giving those tools, curriculum, support, a culture. I aim to build small endowments (micro-grants) such that local youth can start service projects tangibly. I will document lessons, create feedback loops, maintain resilience through leadership rotation. The ambition is not to control, but to set structures that grow beyond me—so that twenty, fifty years later, youth continue to lead, serve and innovate.
Thus present action is partly entrepreneurial, partly institutional. The longtermist justification is that these institutional seeds may bear far more fruit (in collective flourishing) than individual initiatives.
5.3 Ethical Vision, Narratives, and Culture.
Beyond infrastructure and institutions, I believe that we shape the future also through narratives, ethical culture, role modelling. The way I speak, treat others, the values I emphasize (honesty, empathy, foresight, humility) matters a lot. A mentoring session is also a place to plant a moral imagination of flourishing, responsibility, horizon thinking.
I plan to write more—blogs, reflections, sharing stories of youth leadership, making the long view accessible. I hope to help connect local communities with global longtermist thought, translating abstract ideas into grounded practices. In that way, I hope to weave a cultural thread: that it is not just acceptable, but noble, to act today for distant futures.
5.4 Stewardship and Legacy.
I want to think of my life as stewardship. Not ownership, not dominion, but care. From a longtermist standpoint, I ask: what legacy will I leave? Not monuments, but capacities, norms, small institutions, relationships, trust. My hope is that those who come after will not only inherit calibrated infrastructure, but also a culture of moral responsibility, of youth leadership, of service.
I also plan to reserve some margin of humility and reversibility: to avoid locking in designs or institutions that are brittle or authoritarian. The longtermist mindset demands flexibility, responsiveness, the possibility of correction.
6. Epilogue: On the Bridge.
I return to the metaphor: I am a living span, a bridge built between the past, the present, and the distant future. Each plank I place—each mentoring conversation, each design choice, each institutional template, each sacrifice—is a step in the direction I hope others may traverse.
Some of the planks may rot, some may be reclaimed, some future travellers may widen the bridge, go on beyond. But for now, I walk it steadily.
Reading “The Case for Strong Longtermism” gave me not a doctrine to replace my commitments, but a vantage point from which to see their possible magnitude, their fragility, their moral horizon. It deepened the stakes of mentoring, service, infrastructure, leadership, and made me more serious about uncertainty, humility, and institutional resilience.
I do not claim certainty. I do not claim grand revelation. But I claim this: that to act now with an eye to the distant future is not folly—it is responsibility. The youth whose lives I touch, the communities I serve, the structures I help build—all these may carry echoes of my actions far beyond my years. And that possibility makes each choice sacred.
So I continue: mentoring, designing, building, planting seeds in the soil of time. Because the distant future deserves our present care.
Personal information.
Name: Alex Gaciani Watani.
Nationality: Kenyan.
Location: Mombasa, Kenya.
Tel: +254715034405.
Email: Watanialex@gmail.com