How Do You Plan for a Future That Might Not Exist?

But I start with it because we live in a time bereft of such stories – stories of what life could look like if we were able to find a way over the course of the next twenty years to be bold, brilliant and decisive, to act in proportion to the challenges we are facing and to aim for a future we actually feel good about.

Yes. Is the future going to break our hearts? Yes. But around the margins, there is much we could do — on both the resistance and resilience fronts — and it is essential that we do it. Not just for society and the future, but for ourselves. Because only by getting on that bicycle and riding it, can we find our own balance.

For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all

The greatest endemic risk to the psyche in 2021 is not that you’ll end up on the streets next week or fail to fund your retirement in 30 years. The greatest risk is that you’ll feel so relentlessly battered by the weirdness all around that you’ll go numb and simply disengage from the world entirely today.

There are many aspects of life that pull us in opposing directions. We need to be pessimistic enough to prepare for bad outcomes but optimistic enough to undertake new projects. We need to see people both as enmeshed in systems that push them around and as free agents shaping their own lives. It’s vital to be skeptical and ask questions, but also t