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At the start of a year where the news is dominated by pandemic worries, climate crisis, AI anxiety, global injustices and massive inequity, you’d be forgiven for not having optimism about our collective future.
But this year will mark 10 years that I have been writing about the promise of the changes we are all experiencing - about the potential for new solutions, better lives, more human potential. And I feel more confident about that message than ever.
But that optimism seems out of place next to Reuters or Axios or the Wall Street Journal. I come back to a phrase I’ve used before:
a violin in a void.
A term Vladimir Nabokov used to describe his willfully impossible mockery of dictatorships and fascism, topics he knew well because they had upended his life more than once.
But my work about a Wise Economy, a Fusion Era, about Future-Ready Change-Making, isn’t artistic defiance, or wishful thinking, or some kind of Pollyanna hocus pocus about how technology will fix everything. If I offer you that, you should rightly call me foolish.
Our future possibility is powered by two pervasive forces (just as they have in all eras:) technology, and culture. The equipment available to us, and the ways that our minds and emotions and society change in concert with the equipment. That’s been the case since cave drawings morphed into symbols for words, since steel and oxen exploded our food production, since steam power and internal combustion transformed how we create and move and live (more likely don’t live) with our extended families.
When you look at the technologies and cultural change that we see unfolding, that are at the bare beginnings of their possible future form, you see trends that Nabokov could not have fathomed:
Near-infinite access to information (in theory, at least),
Recognition and celebration of the incredible range of human experience (for the more privileged among us, at least).
Technology allows us to learn about people whose experience of the world is nothing like ours, and to gain information and insight about a wider, more complex and more fascinating world than our great-grandparents could have envisioned. Those two macro-trends, and the impacts that fall out as logical corollaries of them, point to the possible realization of something amazing, something dreamed by dreamers across history: untapped human potential.
But none of that is to say that nirvana awaits, or that the highest opportunities will be inevitably realized. This ain’t prophecy.
What I have meant to say (and sometimes sort of managed to get across, I hope), is that the macro-trends, the driving forces of change are pushing in the direction of progress. Of higher human actualization. Of creating the communities that we want to live and work in.
But that doesn’t mean that they will.
As many of you know, a crucial wellspring for my work came out of the experience that I’ve called “a front-row seat for the first wave of the collapse of the Industrial Era.” I know what kind of damage massive economic change causes – damage not just to wallets, but to lives, families, generations, cities. For me, this work is about helping others avoid those pains, or at least mitigate them.
There’s a lot that we can get wrong. Especially if we do nothing, if we acquiesce to old paradigms and expectations. Especially if we fail to spot those out of date assumptions in ourselves. Resistance to change, fear of the new and different, even self-serving cynical manipulation will keep showing up. And even the most determined of us will take a lot of losses.
But the key undercurrents of the changes that we are all living through are also opening the doors to new, more effective and more human-actualizing ways to govern, run businesses, and problem-solve.
We just have to know how to put them to use.
Keep reading for three articles you don’t want to miss, and a trick for helping you learn to be a Future Ready thinker. If you’re a free subscriber, you won’t usually get this. But you can. Upgrade your subscription here
Here’s three articles that show us some unusual dimensions of this emerging era:
Business change and not-change
Pretty lightweight article, but note a couple of things. First, digital transformation was occurring at one rate, and then it sped up – a looooot. That seems to be a common trend. Change can very suddenly accelerate for a whole host of reasons that have nothing directly to do with the technology that’s changing. How do we deal with that? Second, note what it says about demand for meaning at work – the author lists that as something that hasn’t changed, but it’s arguably a side effect of massively increased information access. If your company is doing something less that ideal for humanity, it’s hard not to find out about that now.
Anxiety in kids
https://www.the74million.org/article/survey-mental-health-top-learning-obstacle/
This isn’t a new topic– anxiety has been an issue for lots of kids, including both of my now 20-something sons. Like a lot of issues, it also gives us some insight into the future’s challenges and necessities. For one thing, a VUCA environment is going to necessitate better anxiety and depression treatment for everyone. And unfortunately, our LGBTQIA+ children are living the margin experience - between the belief that the diversity of the human experience is valuable and should be celebrated, and the historic binary that fears anything that doesn’t go into its predetermined buckets.
How to retrofit the housing economy
https://shelterforce.org/2022/08/30/how-to-retrofit-the-housing-economy/
One of the key challenges of moving into the kind of future we want is realizing when our existing systems are ill-fit to what we need now – and having the economic and political willpower to change the status quo. Our ability to kick the can down the road becomes pretty truncated when the road may go somewhere completely different than we thought it would. This is also a great study in externalities, which we’ll get to in the future.
Your Do Now for this week
Think about the community that you live in, work in or care about for whatever reason. Try to imagine three separate futures for that community – maybe one that you would like more, one that you would like less, and one that would be really unexpected. Ask yourself: what would have to happen for those futures to develop from where this community is today?
Wasn’t that great? Get this level of insight and growth every week, for less than you paid for lunch. Your brain will thank you!