Everyone thinks they're being reasonable.. and just for context: I don't put much stock in long-termism, but not because I see it as a potentially dangerous ideological dogma, but because I don't see it as that useful.

In my opinion, the tendency of the optimal action for short-term interests to coincide with the optimal action for long-term interests, and how much easier it is to determine the former over the latter, makes it better to focus primarily on the near future, with a less-well-defined long-term objective being used only to orient one's general direction.