Time Horizon Is The Key

I am taking one of my periodic breaks off of Twitter at the moment. This might be a long one. The lockdown is bringing problems and opportunities.  I want to be totally undistracted to cope with the former and grab the latter. I enjoy the cut and thrust of Twitter. It’s a source of great deal of fun and also education. But I find it narrows my time horizon.  I enjoy the constant stream of novelty.  But it keeps my focus on now not the future.


I have a feeling that I'm not the only person it has this effect on.

This is most noticeable in politics.  The sensational story the last day I was on Twitter was a document that had been 'leaked' from the Labour Party's office.  It purported to show that one faction in the party had been undermining Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and the efforts of the party to win in 2017.

This doesn't sound like an especially unlikely story.  The lack of support from some of its members for his leadership was pretty much out there.  But even so some caution was in order.  There was no author, and no obvious background to why the report was written and who had asked for it to be written.  It was clearly written by someone with an axe to grind.  So was it that important?  Nonetheless  a lot of people were talking about resigning from the party and there were many tweets along the lines of 'how can I trust these people ever again'.  That seemed a bit of an overeaction to what might well have simply been one individual's therapy for all the grief he had endured over the last few years.

Interestingly the new leader of the Labour Party, Kier Starmer barely reacted to the report.  He set up an enquiry into it - because why have one navel gazing internal document when you can have two.  But he was busy doing something very different - talking about the government's exit strategy from the coronavirus lockdown.  It wasn't very exciting but it may well be part of a long term plan to fix a particular image of himself and the party in the public mind.  If so, he's showing a much longer time horizon than the people who were tearing up their party cards.

Where Labour is as a party and where we are as individuals is the sum of everything that has gone before.  The red letter days, crises and triumphs all play their part.  But most things worth doing are marathons rather than sprints.  Spending your time in a heightened state of excitement on Twitter distorts your view of this.  A good snooker player is thinking about how to set the balls up for several shots ahead.  It is much healthier to spend your time on the activities that matter over a longer time horizon.