Future Here Now: Why "Future-Proofing" is so toxic.
Thoughts
I got another email today inviting me to an event that promises to help me “Future Proof” my skills or industry or something.
Any consultant or pundit who tells you to do that should throw up a bunch of red flags for you.
Future Proofing and Future Readiness are not the same thing. Nothing like it.
One is trying to put a little new pizzazz on the old assumptions and mindset. The other is developing the core skills necessary to live in a world that’s becoming profoundly different from the past.
One gives you a new line on your resume that might keep you in your current unstable job a little longer. The other equips you to find the opportunities that you don’t even know exist yet.
Choose wisely.
Maybe learning an AI skill will “future proof” your skills. For a few months. Maybe a year.
Is a year good enough for you? Your family? The communities you rely on?
Is that “Proofing?” Or is that a brief reprieve on the inevitable?
We see no shortage of tech bro types these days who are claiming to have command of the Future. But look behind the AR headsets and Mars plans, and you see that they still cling to the old Industrial Era operational model. Despite their technical skills, they do not understand the cultural and societal changes lying just underneath their code. Meaning the real, deeply significant changes that are undoing and rebuilding how we live and work. Changes like infinite information, and instant connection, and the importance of human creative problem-solving.
So they treat their employees like expendable cogs, and discover that they shot themselves in the foot when they try to push them back into the office after years of successfully working from home. They tout their electric cars, and then discover that their resistance to unions means they cannot unload their parts - or get their cars built. And they try to throw their weight around politically, like a Hearst or a Rockefeller, only to discover that they can’t control their narrative like they did, and their stealthy moves become public knowledge. These new old-timers may make a couple of gains in the short term, but you can see the foundations already crumbling, if you look.
We don’t live in the Industrial Era anymore, but too many people - at all walks of life - are still thinking with an Industrial Era mindset. And the helplessness that the Industrial Era taught some of us, and the hubris that it taught others, acts like a steel ball bolted to a chain around our waists.
At a time when we would do best to run toward the future, to embrace and move into the new ways of working and living that we’re seeing unfold around us, the weight of our old assumptions, our old mindset, makes us sluggish. It holds us back.
It doesn’t have to. Some people are getting out of those chains. And they are succeeding on the new world’s terms. Getting out of that mindset isn’t easy, but it can be done.
And it has to be done. The tide is coming in, and it doesn’t care what we want to cling to.
Far better to learn to ride the waves, than to let our old mindsets drag us to the bottom.
What do you think?