The View From Seven Generations Out

“You cannot plant an oak tree you’re certain will never be seen. That’s not gardening. That’s optimism with dirt under its fingernails.” Steve Martin, Vision-Keeper, Dream Coach, Optimist, Grandfather

The View From Seven Generations Out

The Haudenosaunee principle of seven-generation thinking asks a question most of us never think to ask about our own decisions: how will this look two hundred years from now? Not next quarter. Not next election. Two centuries.

I find this principle inseparable from real optimism, because you cannot plan two hundred years out unless you genuinely believe there will be someone standing there to benefit from the plan. Pessimism has a short time horizon by nature — it’s hard to worry convincingly about a distant future you don’t believe is coming. Optimism is what makes long-range planning possible at all. You cannot plant an oak tree you’re certain will never be seen.

My ancestor Michael Hillegas, the first Treasurer of the United States, was operating on exactly this kind of horizon — building financial infrastructure for a country that, in 1789, had every reasonable chance of failing within a decade. The optimism required to build a functioning treasury for a nation nobody was sure would survive its own experiment is almost unimaginable to me now, and yet it’s the same species of optimism I ask my clients to practice at a much smaller scale: build the structure as if the person you love will still be standing in it seventy years from now, even though you can’t prove it.

Peter Diamandis’s optimism is usually discussed in the language of decades — exponential technologies, the next thirty years of abundance. But I think the same evidence-based hopefulness scales up to two hundred years without much strain. If the data says the trajectory bends toward more, not less — more health, more knowledge, more capacity to solve hard problems — then there’s no reason that trajectory stops mattering after year thirty. It’s the same argument, just given more room to compound.

This is where financial planning and 200-year thinking actually meet, in my experience. A trust structured to benefit great-grandchildren not yet born is, functionally, an optimism instrument. It only makes sense if you believe the family, the country, the species will still be around to use it. Every long-term financial plan I’ve built has this hidden assumption buried in its foundation: that the future is worth building for, patiently, past the point where you’ll personally see the result.

I think about my seven grandchildren and what a two-hundred-year view of their lives would even look like. I won’t see most of it. Neither will they, honestly — two hundred years is longer than any single life. But that’s rather the point. The oak isn’t for the person who plants it.

Optimism, at this scale, stops being a personality trait and becomes something closer to an inheritance practice. You don’t do it because you expect to see the payoff. You do it because you’ve decided the payoff is real enough to be worth building toward, whether or not you’re there to watch it arrive.

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My grandpa always said:
Hope isn’t something you have. It’s something you build, one small decision at a time, especially the hard days.

One Simple Action You Can Take Today
Make one small deposit of belief today — write down one specific good outcome you’re choosing to expect, even without proof yet.

Insights From My Advisory Board
Dolly Parton would say something warm and plainspoken about how you keep singing even when you don’t know if the song will land — and that hope, like a good song, gets better the more you practice it.