Imaginable: How to see the future coming and be ready for anything

This is the final challenge of One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future. Spend some time seriously imagining one or more of the most provocative possibilities. Use your episodic future thinking skills. Immerse yourself in the upside-down world that you’ve just invented.

In studies, when individuals complete an EFT challenge—challenges very much like the one you completed at the start of this chapter, such as, “Imagine yourself meeting a friend for breakfast a year from today,” or “Imagine yourself taking a walk ten years from today”—they subsequently perform significantly better on various tests of creativity.

research, and many others’ since, has shown that gamers set higher goals for themselves in their everyday lives and are less likely to quit in the face of real-world setbacks. They are more likely to ask for help from, and offer real-world assistance to, friends and family they play games with regularly than non-gamers do from their friends and fam

Here’s my advice: use this time now to identify one thing you could do to help one person affected by this force, now or in the future. Keep it small. Don’t try to save the world. Just get ready to help a single soul.

Keep in mind, as you look for clues, that signals aren’t general trends like “artificial intelligence” or “the decline of religious affiliation among young people.” They are vivid, detailed, specific examples of innovation, change, or invention—like “Mindar,” a six-foot-tall, aluminum, androgynous robotic priest that preaches Buddhist sermons insid

the theory of learned helplessness. According to this theory, if we learn that outcomes are independent of our responses—that nothing we do matters—then we will internalize that lesson and carry it with us to other situations. Even if, objectively, we are not helpless, we will feel helpless. And so we will be less likely, whatever future problems w

can teach you my other favorite brainstorming game for inspiring future scenarios. It’s called One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future. Here’s how it works: First, you pick a topic, like work, or food, or learning. Then you list one hundred things that are true about it today. The simpler or more obvious the fact, the better. Next,

Professional game developers will tell you that if you want someone to stick with a game, you have to give them an opportunity to be successful in the first few minutes.

RULE #8: Practice Hard Empathy. Fill in the gaps of your own lived experiences with the stories and realities of other people whose lives are almost unimaginably different from yours. Envision your own life circumstances changing to be more like theirs, as vividly and realistically as you can. How would you feel in this alternate reality? What woul

This makes sense: vividly imagining a possible future creates memories of things we haven’t actually lived through yet, so the pandemic felt familiar to him. And research suggests that “future memories” have a real psychological benefit if and when a traumatic future we imagined actually happens. It’s not just that we’re less surprised by what happ