Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

What’s one “surprising” thing you saw coming and felt ready for? What’s one important change you made, or helped make—in your life, or in your community, or in the world?

We were anticipating it, shaping it, influencing it, every step of the way.”

As we try to tackle the biggest challenges we face, personally and collectively, we don’t want to be limited by what seems normal or reasonable today. That’s why we take mental time trips and run social simulations of the future. To create something new, or make a change, we first have to be able to imagine how things can be different.

You’ve learned to see in the dark. We often say the future is bright, as in full of reasons to be hopeful. But the future is also dark, as in unforeseeable, unknowable. And that’s a wonderful thing, because if we can’t know exactly what the future will be, then it can be anything. We can still change it, we can shape it, we can actively make it wha

You have agency and the ability, using your unique talents and skills and life experiences, to create a world you want to live in.

I go to scale the Future’s possibilities! Farewell! —Henrik Ibsen, playwright

You’re ready to help others through whatever unthinkable events happen next.

So give yourself the gift of simulating the future. Whatever world you wake up in, you won’t get stuck in old ways of doing things. You’ll be ready for something different.

I’ve imagined a moment as strange as this. I’ve trained for a world as unthinkable as this.