I've been sitting with the Dachstein for thirty years now. Not every day, not even every week, but enough that I've started to notice something strange.
The mountain doesn't hurry.
While I've watched towns in the Salzkammergut modernize, seen smartphones replace paper maps, observed tourism patterns shift with global events—the Dachstein just stands there. Same profile against the sky. Same limestone face catching the morning light. It was here 250 million years ago when these rocks were ocean floor. It'll be here long after my great-grandchildren are gone.
And somewhere in that permanence, there's a lesson we keep forgetting.
The Tyranny of Now
We've become obsessed with the immediate. Check your phone—how many notifications are less than an hour old? The average person looks at their device 96 times per day, according to a 2023 study. That's once every ten minutes during waking hours.
Mountains don't check anything.
When I hike up to the Krippenstein, I pass layers of rock that tell stories spanning millions of years. The Wetterstein limestone beneath my boots formed during the Triassic period. The fossils embedded in these stones—ancient coral reefs and marine creatures—lived when dinosaurs hadn't even evolved yet. But we can't see that depth anymore. We've trained ourselves to think in tweets, in quarterly earnings, in election cycles.
The Hallstatt salt mines—which you can still visit today—have been worked for over 7,000 years. Seven thousand. The Celts were mining salt here when Stonehenge was new. The Romans came through. The Habsburg Empire rose and fell. Two world wars swept across Europe. And through it all, the mountains witnessed, unchanged in any meaningful way.
What does that kind of timescale do to your perspective?
The Cost of Forgetting Deep Time
I'm not talking about some mystical communion with nature here. I'm talking about practical wisdom. When you lose the ability to think in geological time—or even just generational time—you make different decisions. Worse decisions.
Consider climate change. The science has been clear since the 1980s. But forty years feels like forever to us now. We can't hold that span in our minds anymore. So we keep pushing the problem forward, assuming future humans will figure it out. The mountains, though? They've seen climate shifts before. The Dachstein glacier has advanced and retreated dozens of times over millennia. It knows what's coming, in its wordless way.
Or think about the 2008 financial crisis. Experts ignored historical patterns that were obvious in retrospect because "this time is different." Except it never is. Mountains could have told us that. They've watched humans make the same mistakes over and over, just with different technology.
What Permanence Actually Teaches
Here's what I've learned from spending time in these Alps: permanence isn't about being unchanging. That's the first misconception.
Mountains change constantly. Erosion carves new features every season. Rockslides reshape valleys. The Gosausee, that stunning alpine lake beneath the Dachstein, didn't exist 20,000 years ago—it was created by glacial retreat. Even the "eternal" peaks are moving, weathering, transforming.
But they change slowly. Deliberately. With a kind of patience that we've completely lost.
The Rhythm That Matters
Walk through Bad Aussee during tourist season and you'll see people rushing from one photo opportunity to the next. Hallstatt especially—that poor village gets over 10,000 visitors some days, all trying to capture the same Instagram shot. They spend maybe two hours there. The mountains have been watching that village for millennia.
Who do you think has the better understanding of the place?
There's a local saying here: "Berg ist Berg." Mountain is mountain. It sounds simple, maybe even stupid. But it means something deeper—that some things just are, independent of our frantic human concerns. The Schafberg doesn't care if you're having a midlife crisis. The Traunstein doesn't worry about your career trajectory.
And there's something freeing in that.
The Future Mountains Already Know
Stand at the base of the Dachstein and think about the future. Not next year's future. Not even next decade's. Think about 2124. Then 2224. Then 3024.
The mountain will still be here. Slightly smaller, maybe. Different snowpack patterns. But recognizably the same mountain. Can you say that about anything else in your life?
Your smartphone will be obsolete in three years. Your car in ten. Your house might last a century if you're lucky. The company you work for probably won't exist in fifty years—90% of Fortune 500 companies from 1955 are gone now. Even your country's borders might shift. Look at how Europe's map has changed just in the past century.
But the mountains? They're playing a different game entirely.
What This Means for How We Live
I'm not suggesting we all become geologists or spend our lives contemplating deep time. But there's something we've lost that mountains remember: the value of thinking beyond ourselves.
The old alpine farmers understood this. They planted trees they'd never see mature. They built stone walls that would serve their grandchildren. They made decisions based on what the land could sustain over generations, not quarters. My neighbor's family has worked the same alm (mountain pasture) for 300 years. Three centuries. They think about soil health in terms of what their great-great-grandchildren will inherit.
When's the last time you made a decision based on what life will be like in 2124?
The Salzkammergut region has been continuously inhabited for 7,000 years because people here learned to think like mountains. Not in days or weeks, but in seasons and generations. They didn't extract everything at once. They didn't assume endless growth. They understood limits.
Witnessing Without Judgment
There's another thing mountains do that we've forgotten: they witness without commentary.
The Traunstein watched the Celts arrive. It watched the Romans build roads. It saw the spread of Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment. It witnessed the rise of the Habsburg Empire and its slow collapse. It stood silent through both World Wars—and yes, there were battles fought in these valleys. Resistance fighters hid in alpine huts. Refugees fled across mountain passes.
The mountain didn't take sides. It just was.
We've lost that ability to simply observe without immediately forming opinions, taking positions, broadcasting reactions. Everything is urgent. Everything demands our immediate emotional response. Mountains remind us that most of what feels urgent today will be forgotten within a generation.
The Archives Written in Stone
Geologists can read mountain faces like history books. Each layer of sedimentary rock is a chapter. Each fossil is a footnote. The Gosaukamm range contains evidence of the moment—65 million years ago—when an asteroid hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs. You can see it in the rock layers if you know where to look.
What are we leaving for future geologists to read?
In 2024, humans produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. But how much of it will survive? Digital storage degrades. Formats become obsolete. The Internet Archive could vanish tomorrow. Meanwhile, the scratches left by glaciers on Dachstein limestone 12,000 years ago are still perfectly visible.
Mountains keep better records than we do.
Learning to Think in Mountain Time
So how do we recover this lost wisdom? How do we remember what mountains have always known?
I don't have a simple answer. But I have observations from three decades of living in their shadow.
Start by sitting still. Not meditating—though that's fine if it's your thing. Just sitting. Pick a spot with a view of peaks and sit there for an hour without your phone. Don't try to have profound thoughts. Just watch the light change on the rock faces. Notice how clouds form and dissipate. See how the wind moves through different elevations.
You'll be bored. Good. Boredom is the first step toward thinking in longer timeframes.
Questions Mountains Force You to Ask
When you spend real time with mountains—not just a weekend hike, but seasons and years—certain questions become unavoidable:
- What will still matter in 100 years?
- What am I building that might outlast me?
- Which of my daily concerns are actually important?
- What would change if I thought in generations instead of years?
- How does my life look from the perspective of deep time?
These aren't comfortable questions. They strip away a lot of what we use to feel important. Your job title doesn't matter to a mountain. Neither does your social media following or your investment portfolio. Mountains force a kind of humility that modern life actively works against.
The Practice of Geological Patience
I've started applying what I call "geological patience" to my own life. It's simple: before making any significant decision, I ask myself how it will look from the perspective of 50 years, 100 years, 200 years.
Will this matter? Will anyone remember? What foundation am I laying for what comes after?
This doesn't mean only doing things that last forever. That's impossible and not even desirable. But it means being honest about what we're actually building versus what we're just consuming. It means planting trees whose shade we'll never sit in. It means making choices that benefit people we'll never meet.
The alpine farmers who built those stone walls 200 years ago? They knew they were building for strangers. But they built well anyway.
The Future Mountains Are Already Living
Here's the thing about mountains and the future: they're already there. They've seen versions of our future play out countless times. Civilizations rise. Civilizations fall. Climate changes. Species adapt or die. Forests advance and retreat. Rivers change course.
The patterns repeat because the underlying forces remain constant: geology, climate, the basic physics of water and stone. We think we're living in unprecedented times. We're not. We're just living in the only times we personally know.
The Dachstein has watched dozens of human cultures come and go in this valley. The Celts seemed permanent until they weren't. The Roman Empire looked eternal until it collapsed. The Habsburg dynasty ruled for 600 years—a decent run by human standards, barely a moment by geological ones.
What makes us think our current civilization is any different?
What Endures
But here's the hopeful part: some things do endure. Not institutions or technologies or political systems. Those are all temporary. But patterns of human behavior, the basics of community, the fundamental relationship between people and place—those persist.
People have been grazing cattle on alpine meadows here for thousands of years. The specific families change. The tools evolve. But the basic practice continues because it works, because it's sustainable, because it respects what the land can give without breaking it.
That's the kind of future mountains know: not one of constant growth and disruption, but one of sustainable patterns that work with natural limits rather than against them.
The mountain doesn't promise progress. It promises presence. It doesn't offer growth. It offers endurance. And maybe that's exactly what we need to remember.
Bringing Mountain Wisdom Home
You don't have to live in the Alps to learn from mountains. You don't even need mountains nearby. What you need is the willingness to think beyond yourself, beyond your lifetime, beyond the immediate urgency of now.
Ask yourself: What am I building that might last? Not in stone necessarily, but in relationships, in knowledge passed down, in land restored, in communities strengthened. What would change about your daily decisions if you thought like a mountain—patient, present, playing the long game?
The Salzkammergut has taught me that the most important things happen slowly. Erosion carves valleys over millennia. Forests establish themselves over centuries. Soil builds over generations. And human wisdom—real wisdom, not just information—accumulates the same way.
We've forgotten this in our rush toward whatever future we think we're building. We've traded depth for speed, permanence for novelty, wisdom for data. Mountains remember what we've lost. They're still here, still patient, still teaching anyone willing to slow down long enough to learn.
The Dachstein will be here in 2124. In 2524. In 5024. Long after our current concerns have faded into the same obscurity that claimed the worries of the Celts and Romans and Habsburgs who walked these same valleys.
The question isn't whether mountains will endure. They will.
The question is whether we'll remember what they know before it's too late to matter.