The World You Fear Is Ahead... Is Not.
And surprises we should expect instead.
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to explain how a futurist thinks about the present. The hair-on-fire present.
Forget McCarthy and the House GOP for a minute. Yes, that’s going to be bad and lead to a bad, dumb things soon but…
The future will be different from the present. In many ways it will be better. In a few ways it may be worse.
This was the simplest thing I was taught in Studies of the Future program at University of Houston - Clear Lake back in the day but it’s been the hardest thing to accept.
Here’s why: when you’re scared or cynical — like most of us have been for a while — you become trapped in the present and you cannot imagine the future being better. Or different. When we’re scared or cynical we just extrapolate our worries out into the future. (Fear happens in the back brain and can override imagination, which happens in the front brain.)
Sometimes futurists fall prey to this, too. Early in my futurist career I met a futurist who was stuck in the 1970s. He was still overly worried about government wiretapping and Nixonian totalitarianism and I couldn’t get him to understand that not only (1) did we both have cell phones on the table that could listen to us any time without our permission that (2) in a few years as those phones got smart we would probably be sitting in that same Starbucks shouting to our phones HEY WIRETAP DO CATS LIKE WAFFLES?
While it’s difficult to imagine the future being different — and how extremely different it may be — the inverse is true: explaining the present to your past self may be impossible.
Two comedians get this right:
Ryan George does a recurring sketch in which he’s a reporter from a 1990s-era talk show. In this episode he’s been shot forward in time to 2020 to the dawn of the pandemic… and is abjectly bewildered. “I don’t like it here at all. Please bring me home right now. This year is awful…. I got my hands on one of these smart phone things but it’s just a shiny rectangle and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with it.” Then he discovers Twitter and why no one will let him into the McDonald’s Playplace.
Julie Nolke did something similar: every few months through 2020 she went back to visit herself from a few months earlier. So in April-May of 2020 she went back to visit her January 2020 self who has no idea what’s coming. Rinse. Repeat.
My point right now is that the world of the next decade, of next year, even of next month may be very different than now, and our sensibilities about it all will be very different.
Think about how different the world was and your life was:
between 1988 and 1992 (the Soviet Union and the geopolitical world we assumed would last forever suddenly… didn’t)
between 8am and 8pm on September 11, 2001 (the attacks)
between November 2015 and November 2016 (the arrival and election of Trump)
between January and April 2020 (the onset of the pandemic)
between noon and 6pm on January 6, 2021 (the Capitol Riot)
After Biden’s inauguration I went out to get a sandwich. My dad called me while I was in the car. He asked “How long until the country starts to settle back down?” I said “By maybe Saturday.” He was a bit stunned. “Really? That soon?” I said “Yeah, we’re in a new world now. It began an hour ago.”
So now I begin another series: Surprises We Should Expect.
I don’t do point-predictions but I’ll posit a few things now. (I’ll treat all of these with the nuance and alternative futures these deserve in future newsletters, but bear with me for a moment.)
Right now for a lot of us, the world looks like it’s burning. And it is. But in the next decade and perhaps sooner…
The political polarization of the past two decades will probably be over. Or rather, the legislative logjams and the white-knuckle-close elections where we hold our breath to see whether the candidate who got 7 million more votes wins or how the Electoral College razor-thin margins will work in this election. The Democrats are apt to start taking unbeatable majorities and, whether you like their policies or not, unlike literally this past seven days, Washington will start functioning again, and functioning well. (For more on this forecast see my post here.)
For the same reasons, democracy may be restored for another century — or the United States will be fundamentally different and like nothing any of us have ever known.
24-hour cable news and all that partisan shouting will be over because the channels will be gone — or shadows of their former selves — for the same trend reasons I talked about last week. Cable TV is dying — fast — as is most linear TV. News consumption will happen differently. Not sure how yet, but it won’t be what we have now.
Our main national security threat may not be from another country or terrorism; it may be from heat. And the weather. And that national security adversary will hit us with an ‘attack’ (a severe weather event) somewhere in the country every six weeks. FEMA and the National Guard may become the real new first responders. The Department of, heck, the Interior functionally may become the new Department of Homeland Security. You may worry less about war or terrorism than about your own ability to withstand weather, infrastructure, and supply chain shocks. One of your ongoing worries may be whether (or for how long) your electric vehicle could power your house. You may wonder what your insurance company will require of you next to keep your homeowner’s policy — or whether you can get homeowner’s insurance again if you move to another state because the wildfire or weather event risks in your new state may be too high.
You’ll spend a lot less time on your phone or on social media; you’ll be arguing with it in the car instead as part of an ongoing, possibly addictive, conversation with your personal AI assistant. And, like a relative with dementia or mild schizophrenia, you’ll wonder whether what your AI is telling you is real or a hallucination. Especially when your dinner destination is a field but your AI insists the restaurant is real and shows you the reservations it made for you at 9pm. Or you went to the movies but found yourself as part of a flash mob designed to support something you find reprehensible and cruel. More than merely trick you into new behavior, you may worry whether your AI, its algorithm, and its makers are subtly reformulating your worldview. (To calibrate, you’ll occasionally ask it a hard question that you already know the sophisticated answer to and see how accurate and thorough its answer is.) For reliability, trustworthiness, and addiction-risk-reduction reasons, many may lurch back to faith in established, professional news sources and expertise.
The future will be different from the present. In many ways it will be better. In a few ways it may be worse. But the thing you worry about today may be fifteen minutes from its end and the world you fear may emerge ain’t in the cards after all. The hopes and worries of the 2030s — or even 2026 — may be completely different than those of now.
Can’t quite accept that could be true? Can’t imagine that the legislative logjam might be broken soon — or ever? Try this. Here’s your canary in the coal mine for today.
The future you can’t imagine yet may have already started and we’ve barely noticed yet.
We’re in a new world now. It may have begun an hour ago.
Great insights! Thanks for sharing emerging trends of hope.