I like Hal Hershfield's perspective. The long view isn't just for civilizations and cathedrals; it's a compass for our personal journeys too. 

Think of your life as a project that outlasts you. The companies we make? They're legacies in the making. The communities we build? They're the seeds of forests that will shade generations we'll never meet. 

Recently he spoke with Jacob Kuppermann for Long Now.

"When I talk about us overweighting the present so much that we divorce it from the rest of time, what I mean is that sometimes, we fail to see how the individual presents add up to a cumulative future. I think you [at Long Now] are taking our traditional sense of the present and making it more expansive, making it more of an umbrella that includes the recent and even more distant past plus the more proximal and more distant future. The advantage there is that I think it can help convey the idea that various futures are part of who we are right now."

Interview: Getting in Touch with "Your Future Self"