When We Learned to Live in the Future
The agricultural revolution and the first rung of abstraction
Every technological revolution has pushed human life further into abstraction. Each step forward has asked us to live more in our heads and less in direct contact with the real world. This is what I mean by abstraction.
This article is the first chapter in that story, the moment when abstraction became a condition of survival.
It begins when we first learned to live in the future. When seeds went into the ground, and for the first time, survival depended on what might happen months from now rather than what was happening today.
A farmer stands at the edge of a newly planted field. The seeds are in the ground. The work is done.
Now... the wait begins.
Months stretch ahead. Will the rains come? Will there be sufficient sunlight? Will animals destroy the crop? Will the gods be pleased? Will everything I’ve done be enough?
For the first time in human history, survival depends not only on what you do today, but on what you hope will happen months from now. The feedback loop, the ancient rhythm of action and consequence, has been severed. You plant in spring. You harvest in fall. And in between, you wait.
This was perhaps the biggest cognitive shift in human history. A profound and irreversible moment for human psychology.
And we don’t talk about it.
Before Agriculture: Living in the Immediate
For over 200,000 years, humans lived in what anthropologists call immediate-return environments. The term comes from James Woodburn’s groundbreaking 1982 study of egalitarian societies, and it describes a way of life most of us can barely imagine: hunt today, eat today. Gather today, eat today. The feedback was direct, fast, and unmistakably real.
You didn’t have to wonder if your effort would pay off. Reality told you, immediately. Unmistakably. The animal either appeared or it didn’t. The berries were ripe or they weren’t. The water was where you expected or it wasn’t.
There was less need to spend time mentally simulating future scenarios, because the present provided all the feedback you needed to know that your life was on track. Things are ok. You are doing well. Right here, right now.
In this setting, your mind can simply be here. A kind of effortless mindfulness.
Picture it: You’re tracking an animal through the forest. Your attention is total—the bent grass, the broken twig, the scent on the wind. There’s no mental chatter about yesterday’s hunt or tomorrow’s weather. The feedback loop is tight: you notice, you adjust, you move. When you find the animal, you know immediately whether your tracking worked. When you return to camp with food, the group eats tonight.
This kind of cognition isn’t “simple” or “primitive.” It’s sophisticated, embodied intelligence. Your whole nervous system is engaged with what’s actually happening, not what might happen someday.
The anthropological record suggests this was our default state for most of human history. A kind of present-moment awareness that can be hard to even imagine, let alone experience, today.
From this perspective, the current trend of somatic and embodied wellness practices are attempts to return to this more present-centered way of being.
The Shift: Seeds in the Ground
Around 10,000 BCE, something fundamental changed. In the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and other regions, humans began planting seeds. Grain could be stored. Surplus could be accumulated. Seasons had to be tracked. The future had to be planned.
This wasn’t just an economic shift. It was a fundamental shift in cognitive style.
Suddenly, the brain had to do something it had never been required to do before: to live in a different time. Not just visit, but to establish residence. You had to imagine scenarios that didn’t exist yet. What if it doesn’t rain? What if raiders come? What if I planted too late? We became mental time travelers.
Psychologist Leonard Martin calls this I-D Compensation Theory—the idea that humans evolved with an innate need for immediate feedback, but when environments became “delayed-return” (the gap between effort and outcome grew longer), we developed what he calls “delayed-return skills” to cope. These skills are forms of abstract thinking: mental simulation, future-scenario modeling, rumination—all forms of mental time travel.
In other words, we learned to fill the gap between planting and harvest with thought.
The Cognitive Cost of Waiting
This was adaptive. It had to be. Agriculture allowed civilization, cities, skill specialization, art, science, everything we now call progress.
But it came at a cost.
Here’s what recent discoveries in cognitive science are revealing: the human brain didn’t evolve new structures capable of abstract thinking and mental time travel. Instead, it repurposed the systems we already had, systems designed for processing here-and-now sensory experience.
When you think about “next year’s harvest,” your brain is using the same neural machinery it uses to see a field in front of you. When you plan for the future, you’re borrowing from the tools built for navigating physical space.
This is why we speak and think in metaphors. We don’t just “think about” the future. We “look ahead” to it. We don’t just “consider” ideas. We “grasp” them, “hold” them, “turn them over.” The words we use, our very language, holds the history of this transition like layers of sediment in rock.
We use here-and-now language and mental processing to do our time traveling. No, it’s not ideal. Yes, it does have a cost.
It’s cognitively expensive. Exhausting. The systems designed to help you sense a predator in the grass are now running simulations of futures that don’t exist yet, problems that haven’t happened, threats that might never come.
But here is the paradox: this “monkey mind”—the wandering, planning, worrying mind that some mindfulness traditions position as a problem—is actually remarkably effective and functional. It serves an important purpose, even if we often find its spontaneity and busyness quite uncomfortable and annoying.
Recent research on mind-wandering reveals something crucial: when your mind drifts from the present moment, it’s running simulations, testing scenarios, preparing for possibilities. In a delayed-return world, this is adaptive. The human brain isn’t malfunctioning when it thinks about next season while working this one, or imagines drought while watching rain, or plans for winter during harvest. It’s doing exactly what agriculture demanded it do.
The problem isn’t that we developed this capacity. The problem is that we never turn it off.
Agriculture made abstract thinking mandatory for survival. And we’ve been living with the cognitive burden ever since.
A Glimpse of Life Before the Future
Anthropologist Daniel Everett spent decades studying the Pirahã people of the Amazon rainforest, one of the few remaining groups living in immediate-return conditions. He discovered something remarkable: they had what he called an “immediacy of experience principle.” Their language lacked words for worry, for distant future planning, for abstract time. They lived entirely in the present—not as a spiritual practice, but as a natural consequence of their environment.
Everett wrote:
“The Pirahãs simply eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.”
Agriculture made that impossible. Once you store grain, you have to worry about theft. Once you plant for next season, you have to worry about weather. Once survival depends on events months away, your mind can’t rest in the present. It must live in the future.
For the first time, human minds became chronically abstract.
What We Started to Lose
We gained the ability to plan, to build, to think in systems and timelines. We gained everything that makes modern life possible.
But we also began losing something harder to name: the ability to just be here. The calm that comes when feedback is immediate. The clarity of living in your senses rather than your simulations.
Consider what delayed-return thinking actually requires on a daily basis:
You have to track time in units that don’t exist in nature—weeks, months, years. You have to remember what you planted where, and when. You have to calculate whether your stored grain will last until next harvest. You have to worry about things that haven’t happened yet and might never happen.
And perhaps most fundamentally: you have to live with chronic uncertainty. In an immediate-return world, you know by sundown whether today worked. In a delayed-return world, you won’t know for months, years, even decades. Retirement planning is perhaps the ultimate expression of this: you sacrifice present comfort for a future that’s 40 years away, one you might never reach.
The farmer who planted those first seeds didn’t just create agriculture. They created a new form of psychological pressure—the uncertainty of waiting, of not knowing, of having the rewards of your work arrive at a distant point in the future.
That pressure became our permanent condition 10,000 years ago.
And every technological revolution since has intensified it.
This isn’t a critique of agriculture. It is a missing piece of the story.
This moment 10,000 years ago, when seeds went into the ground and our minds went into the future, this is where our climb of the abstraction ladder starts.
Every technological revolution since has extended that wait. The Industrial Revolution stretched feedback loops across continents. The Digital Revolution made them invisible. And now, AI is abstracting us even further, into models of models of models, where the gap between action and outcome is so long we can barely see it at all.
The First Rung
We planted seeds 10,000 years ago. And in a very real sense, we’ve been waiting ever since.
The question isn’t whether we can get rid of the abstraction ladder. We can’t.
The question is whether we can learn to move up and down the ladder—abstract enough to survive in a delayed-return world, but still grounded enough to feel alive.
That’s the tension at the heart of this November series. Each week, we’ll explore another major technological revolution and how it further shaped the human mind towards more and more abstraction.
Next Wednesday, we turn to the Industrial Revolution and what happens when the first wave of machines arrive.
Understanding how we got here is the first step toward finding our footing. See you next week.
-James
Note on AI collaboration: The ALIVE Letter explores how humans can stay fully human while learning to work with modern technology. In that same spirit, I collaborate with AI in the creation of these essays. As an industrial/organizational psychologist who studies human-AI collaboration, I carefully guide, refine, and evaluate AI outputs. At its best, this partnership helps me more clearly and authentically communicate my own thoughts and perspective than I am able to alone.