Is it still rational to plan for the future?

Selecting salads and counting pennies in an unstable world

The thing you have to understand about me is I adore a marginal gain — those little, incremental improvements that together can generate significant results. And to be clear, I had adored them long before Sir Dave Brailsford popularised the concept when, as head of British Cycling, he helped transform a team of middling riders into world-beaters with his theory of 1% refinements.

As a child, I was always more of a saver than a spender. It helped that I had every conceivable need cared for and catered to (though, in the era before wireless internet and iPads, I was not allowed a television in my bedroom). So pocket money was diligently saved and any spare change deposited in an oversized, plastic Coca-Cola piggy bank that took the best part of a decade to fill.

In other words, place a marshmallow test in front of younger me, and I’d ace it every time.

This way of thinking is hard to shake. As a young adult, I would look forward not only to Christmas but to December 21st, the shortest day of the year. Because once the northern hemisphere hits that portentous date, residents can achieve absolutely nothing in a day yet still earn an additional 90 seconds of light.

But the older I get, the less sure I have grown. Not in the power of compound interest or the oddities of Earth’s tilt, but in whether exercising strategic patience is still rational. As the erosion of rules-based international order continues to accelerate, and my personal risk of death rises exponentially if I dare attend a Jewish event, the exercise of caution feels simultaneously necessary and absurd.

Specific images flash through my mind — like the Key & Peele sketch, in which Jordan Peele prepares to pour some sweetener into his coffee before turning his head, glancing out at a nuclear explosion and promptly choosing proper sugar instead. When the apocalypse is unfolding, zero-calorie options lose whatever appeal they might once have held.