Future Here Now: I Don't Know

Big Idea

This week’s Future Here Now focuses on one of the more uncomfortable parts of life in the Fusion Era: Not knowing.

As in, not knowing…why that happened.  Who’s in charge.  What to do next.  What the right answer is.  

If, as we’ve discussed here, the emerging social/cultura/economic/technological era is being defined by new levels of interconnection, new types of interdependency, new ranges of options for everything from finding a mate to picking a pair of shoes, then that means that our ability to develop complete and utter confidence that we have made the right choice is about nil.  The possible permutations extend well beyond our ability to mentally categorize, sort and choose.  

I would posit that a lot of the insistence we see today from reactionary types who want a return to some kind of (usually imagined) simpler world – where men were men and women were women and you only had five options to pick from at the hamburger stand – are reactions to a world of increasing complexity and ambiguity.  But just as biological science has demonstrated that female and male aren’t binaries, but points on a continuum with near infinite possibilities, almost every other aspect of our lives and communities turns out to have far more possible ways of turning out than most of us ever imagined in our Industrial Era, binary-driven upbringing. 

And that means that a lot of the times, we aren’t going to get an easy simple answer.  There probably isn’t one.  

So what do we do then? 

That’s what we’re exploring this week.  

Big Idea

Somewhere between first grade and middle school, we seem to lose the ability to admit without guilt to the things that we don’t know.  And that’s not to our advantage, especially in an emerging era where there’s a whole lot that we aren’t going to know.  A whole lot.  

I think there’s a reason for this problem, in addition