My mother’s linen closet door is covered in drawings made by her grandchildren. This gallery is always in rotation, and the subject matter of the artwork changes as the kids age — trucks, sharks, unicorns, skyscrapers.

For a while there was a felt pen drawing of a group of stick figures, all playing with oversized fidget spinners. I presume this picture was drawn in 2017, because the rise and fall of the fidget spinner trend happened almost entirely within that calendar year.

Over 200 million of the things were sold, making it a nearly one-billion-dollar industry that came and went quicker than the original run of Twin Peaks.

Everything has an era, a life span — ideas, technologies, cultural practices, nations, scientific theories, belief systems, and catch phrases. The longevity of any given thing varies tremendously. Compare the Fidget Spinner Era to that of the Roman Empire (31 BC – 476 AD), the 35mm camera (1913-2006), or even Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980). Some things last longer than others, and not for no reason.

During the lifetime of a given thing, it’s often not clear where in its lifetime you are. If you saw some Shakespeare plays in London in 1593, you might not have guessed that they’d still be in production four hundred years later, even if you recognized them as exceptionally good. In 1986, when you read a Time magazine article about the Soviet Union, you’d never have guessed that six years later there wouldn’t even be a Soviet Union.

The best indication of how long something might exist is how long it has already existed. If an idea or technology has survived for ten or twenty generations, there’s evidently something about it that’s resistant to change, obsolescence, and generation gaps. Something about it sustains itself even as everything around it comes and goes.

The humble knife is a good example. An edged tool for cutting tough materials apart is just as useful to 21st-century home chef as it was to a nomadic hunter a hundred thousand years ago. The long past of the knife suggests it will have a long future. In other words, we’re probably not living in the last few years of an eons-long Knife Era.

By the same token, something that has just become “a thing” is less likely to be a long-lasting thing. If everyone around you is suddenly watching rapid-fire videos on something called TikTok, what are the odds we’re in the first few years of a thousand-year TikTok Era?

The name for this phenomenon is the Lindy effect: as a general rule, the older something is, the longer it can be expected to survive into the future.

The seed of this idea was formed in the nineteen-sixties by a group of comedians who gathered nightly at Lindy’s diner in New York, to discuss over cigars and coffee the likely longevity of various acts in the comedy scene. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb developed and popularized the concept in his books, and gave it its current name.

There are exceptions to the Lindy effect, and the rule applies only to non-perishable things that don’t have natural life cycles. A ninety-nine year old man is unlikely to live another ninety-nine years — although his ideas or inventions might.

Imperfect as it is, the Lindy effect offers a useful heuristic for determining what’s likely to stick around, and implies that there are reasons behind its longevity, which may not be obvious. If it’s a part of culture, perhaps it fills a human need nothing else quite can. Music and dancing are Lindy, as are religion, sport, mind-altering substances, painting, and sculpture. The wider the range of past conditions something has already survived, the broader the range of possible future conditions it’s likely suitable for.

It’s important to note that something being Lindy only suggests there’s a reason it continues to exist — it doesn’t mean it’s good in the moral sense. Alcoholism is Lindy. War is Lindy.

Aside from just being kind of neat, the Lindy effect has some practical uses, especially when it comes to navigating our current age of ephemera and excessive content. A new book might debut on the bestseller list and garner wild praise, but the real test of its greatness is how long it garners praise. Virality and buzz are achieved every day — the test of time is much harder to pass. Lindy points to James Joyce and the Brontë sisters, not Malcolm Gladwell or Steig Larsson. Even more strongly, it points to the Stoics, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching.

Assessing the Lindyness of things essentially helps you avoid recency bias: the tendency to overestimate the importance of recent experiences. For example, the Lindy effect inspired writer Thomas Wachenfelder to ignore daily news in favor of a weekly catch-up on the weekend: “By then, the day-to-day noise has faded somewhat, allowing content that will be relevant for more than one day rise to the surface. Even better are monthly publications.”

Simply noticing what’s Lindy or not can punch through that haze of recency bias, to determine how likely it is that a present-day thing will still be a thing in a decade, or a century.

The necktie as standard business dress is somewhat Lindy — it might be here in 100 years, but probably not 500.

Christianity isn’t likely to go away in the next century. Scientology, quite possibly.

People will probably still use the phrase “last but not least” in 50 years, but not “circle back” or “touch base.”

Claude Monet may be a well-known name in 200 years. Andy Warhol — less likely. Jeff Koons, much less likely.

Some things can be so prominent at a given moment in history that they seem like they’ll be here forever, yet they’re not Lindy. The internet is not Lindy. Right now, it’s a huge part of life and culture, but only a generation ago it was a promising curiosity, and two generations ago it was an obscure technology known only to a handful of tech nerds. It’s possible that we’re at the beginning of a thousand-year internet era, but I think it’s more likely that it will morph into something completely different over the next decade or two (as it already has since this blog launched fifteen years ago). Social media already seems past its peak.

(I recommend Sam Kriss’s brilliant essay The Internet is Already Over if you want your mind blown on this question.)

Humans are terrible at predicting the future in large part because of recency bias. We tend to imagine future human life as being like the present, just with some of the dials cranked. Even flatter flatscreens! Cars, but they’ll be flying! We have no reference images of the future, so we can construct future visions only out of familiar present-day phenomena, usually by simply exaggerating them. This is why futuristic visions drawn in the 1960s look so 1960s. They don’t resemble the 1990s or 2000s that actually happened.

Yet, the Lindy effect gives us a halfway reliable instrument for predicting which parts of now might remain in 100 or 1000 years — and which parts future people will likely jettison. I can only guess, but I’d bet in a hundred years they’ll have ditched rapid-fire video content, pumpkin spice espresso drinks, and the concept of microaggressions, while long walks, vegetable gardens, and gatherings around fireplaces will remain.

Lindyness is a gentle suggestion to zoom out and look beyond today’s most prominent, attention-grabbing ideas, books, diversions, hobbies, and beliefs, and instead take some implicit advice from the diverse range of people who lived, and will live, outside of the weather of our current moment.

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Update: Originally I had a different Jeff Koons sculpture pictured, which I didn’t know was a memorial to victims of the 2015 Paris attacks. This photo selection was not intended as a criticism of the sculpture, or of Koons, only the non-Lindyness of that art style. Memorials are Lindy — shiny balloon scultures probably not.

Long to-do list? (Discount ends soon!)

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Images by Namroud Gourguis, Spyda-Man, Nathan Dumlao, Chucky Darko, Christian Gebhardt, and Lloyd Birmingham