Every person alive carries two competing capacities for relating to time.

The first responds to the immediate: the notification, the craving, the threat in front of us right now.

The second reaches further: it plans, it plants, it builds for futures it may never inhabit.

Public philosopher Roman Krznaric calls these the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain.

The work of becoming a good ancestor is, at its foundation, the work of learning to act from the second.