Answering this question depends a little on having a sense of what the “non-longtermist status quo” is, but:
I think there’s more than one popular way of thinking about issues like this,
in particular I think it’s definitely not universal to take existential risk seriously,
I think common-sense and the status quo include some (at least partial) longtermism, e.g. I think popular rhetoric around climate change has often held the assumption that we were taking action primarily with our descendants in mind, rather than ourselves.
Answering this question depends a little on having a sense of what the “non-longtermist status quo” is, but:
I think there’s more than one popular way of thinking about issues like this,
in particular I think it’s definitely not universal to take existential risk seriously,
I think common-sense and the status quo include some (at least partial) longtermism, e.g. I think popular rhetoric around climate change has often held the assumption that we were taking action primarily with our descendants in mind, rather than ourselves.