Are you open to all your futures, or just the comfortable ones?

Originally written for a book to be published in South Korea, edited by Douglas Huh.

The future. It’s a strange place. We’re hurtling towards it, relentlessly, yet we never seem to make it all the way there. Still, we think about it a lot, and we talk about it even more. “–Next year I must…”. “– In the future, I will…”. “In twenty years, we’re all going to…”

At the same time, many of us look to the future in a very limited way. You may think you’re thinking about the future, but more often than not you’re only imagining what you already know, if a little enhanced. You’re used to your mobile phone, so you imagine slightly better mobile phones. You’re used to your car, so you imagine cars — if electric and self-driving ones. You’ve studied something, so you imagine a world in which this something is still relevant, and pretty similar to the thing you studied.

And there’s the rub.

While you might think you are pretty good at looking towards the future, the likelihood is that you see only a very limited segment of the same. Call it confirmation bias, call it wishful thinking, we all tend to engage in two kinds of future thinking — fantasy and denialism. In the latter, we might on an abstract level accept that things such as ecological disasters and other great upheavals are possible, even likely, yet we still turn a more or less blind eye. In the former, we imagine a future in which we are the stars, in which people have accepted our worldview as the one true one, and where technology has developed in ways that fulfill more and more of our fondest wishes.

The only problem?

There is one eternal truth of futures thinking: Whatever we think of the future, it is most likely wrong.

Note that this has got nothing to do with how smart you are, how well-read you are, not even with how much time you dedicate to futures thinking. The scary, sad fact of the matter is that regardless who you are, you’re going to be wrong about the future. The only people who’ve managed to break free of this law of nature are the one’s who’ve made enough guesses (and often, sufficiently vague ones) that some turn out to be correct thanks to sheer chance. (I’m looking at you, Ray Kurzweil.)

Why is this so? Simple. Our patterns of thinking, the frameworks with which we try to make sense of the world around us, are products of our history. We look to the future through lenses crafted by our education and our experience, and these lenses are always warped and filtered. More specifically, they are irrevocably shaped by your identity and your desire to protect the same, and this has a thorough if at times subtle effect on what we see and what we can imagine.

So as not to make this too much about you, dear reader, let us imagine a hypothetical person, a woman by the name of Ji-eun. She was always a pretty decent student, and always interested in science. She went to university, and became an engineer, specialized in aerospace technology. At university, she also developed an interest in futures studies, and took courses in the same. Currently, she has a nice if somewhat staid management position in a global corporation, and is thinking about the future. What is she likely to notice?

If Ji-eun is like most people, she will have noticed a number of alarming signs regarding our climate, our ecological system as a whole, our economic system, not to mention global politics and overall safety. Still, she’s likely to have noticed but effectively ignored most or all of this. In a word, such matters are far too big, far too complex for her to really grasp, so she makes a note of them, but in the end doesn’t think too long and hard about matters that seem too big and scary to really engage with. Succinctly put, she sees these futures, but effectively denies them at the same time.

In part, this is due to there being other, more fun things to notice. There’s a lot of buzz about women in the STEM fields, and Ji-eun can’t help but to like this. Sounds like things’ll be quite a lot better in the future for people like her! Also, everyone is raving about drones now, which obviously sounds like a wonderful idea for an aerospace engineer. In fact, most everything Ji-eun reads indicates that the future is going to be one amazing place. She reads about the endless possibilities, the way in which technology will make everything easier, and about how specifically aeronautics will enter a new golden age.

Too bad it’s mostly a mirage.

What Ji-eun is missing is that at the same time as all these lovely, nice, promising things appear to promise a wonderful future, there are many other signals too. While she’s reading up on drones, interesting things are happening in the railway sector and it’s extensions. Developments in edu-tech is making it easy and cheap for a few tens of millions people to replicate her education, and they’re all prepared to work for less than she is. Political upheaval is threatening the very markets her company is active in, and although Ji-eun has heard some rumblings about “aquifer depletion”, she hasn’t really realized that this might make the region she’s lived her entire life in uninhabitable during her lifetime.

Now, why should Ji-eun (and, in extension, you) think about such things? They’re annoying at best, and terrifying at worst. Which is exactly the point. As human beings, we’re very good at spotting patterns. This fact often makes us think we’re natural trendspotters, people with a knack for seeing the future (we’ve all felt a sense of accomplishment when something we ‘just felt’ becomes reality or hits the mainstream). But this, our capacity to fit things together, exists in parallel with another human, all too human tendency.

While we are good at spotting patterns, we are also very good at protecting our identity, our core. Consider, again, Ji-eun. She is of course a woman with free will, but she is also a creation of her own history. Her education, her experiences, her hard-fought competence and capabilities all come together to form a life story, a tale of how she got to become Ji-eun. Her schooling, her career, her knowledge are all investments she’s made, investments she wants to protect. She became an engineer through hard work, and now, she wants to protect that investment. Her career was built through many hours of labor, and now she wants to protect that. She’s battled both bullies and arrogant men through her life, and now she feels she’s entitled to some payback. Succinctly put, her life so far has been a tremendous investment, one she wants to protect.

So when Ji-eun reads the news, or studies trends, she is always already biased. She looks for the things that can tell her that her work this far hasn’t been for naught. She seeks a pattern that makes the pattern she’s followed this far meaningful and sensible. So she will, unconciously, look for patterns which tell her that women in the STEM field, particularly aeronautics, will have a great life ahead of them, one that makes all the hardships she’s endured thus far worth it. The signals that tell a different story, the one’s that might tell her that she’s wasted part of her life, those she won’t see. She’ll notice the suitable patterns, the comfortable patterns, but the one’s at cross-purpose to this she’ll ignore or consider foolish.

In the end, Ji-eun is us, and we are Ji-eun. We all look for the futures we wish to become true, because they are futures in which we can be stars. The curious thing, though, is that these are the futures we should ignore. If they come along, fine! What marvelous luck! But we should be looking for futures that challenge us, that threaten us, that make us scared. Why? Because they are the ones that can prepare us for a future that is less comfortable and streamlined than the one we’re seeing now.

The world is a funny place. At every moment, it is filled with people and trends trying to make you redundant, unemployed, pointless. It’s not nice, no, but that’s just how the world works. It’s not that it always succeeds to make you redundant, but it tries. So what we should do, so as not to be like Ji-eun, is to prepare ourselves. Rather than letting the world surprise us, catch us with our pants down, we should try to surprise ourselves.

So, if you want to take the future seriously, here’s what you need to do. Don’t consider the futures in which you’ll do wonderfully. Instead, consider the various ways in which your education can become worthless, your experience without value. Consider worst case scenarios, the ones that would turn you into a pauper and a beggar. Think long and hard about the manner in which changes in society, culture and technology can make you redundant, and then consider that things might get even worse. It won’t be pleasant, quite the contrary, but it might just save your (working) life.

This, because it is only when you’ve considered the worst possible outcome that you can start planning seriously. It’s only when you’ve been prepared to let go of your experience that you can start thinking freely about the future. It’s only when you’ve become open to the fact that the future might be out to get you that you can start thinking about how to change with, rather than changed by, the future.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my own, upcoming failures. I think about how the institutions I know best might collapse, and about how the knowledge I’ve accrued might become worthless. It’s not fun, but no-body said futures thinking should be. I do it because I know that trusting pretty pictures of the future is a lot like believing your own hype — pleasant but deadly.

So don’t be like Ji-eun. Don’t be open to just the futures you’d like to see. Rather think very hard about the least pleasant futures, the ones which can truly disrupt you. They might never come, but being prepared for them is still a thousand times better than remaining in the bubble of safety created by our desire to hold on to what we already know, what we’re already comfortable with, and what we’d wish to see in the future. For all of us, preparation still beats wishful thinking.