2. Pick an archetype. Or pick four! What kind of story do you want to tell about the future? Professional futurists often classify scenarios into one of four kinds of stories or archetypes: growth, constraint, collapse, or transformation.

In high-income countries, 5 percent of all municipal budgets is spent managing trash.

Communities. What communities are you a part of? What groups are you a member of?

The XPRIZE organization designs and hosts public competitions intended “to catalyze innovation and accelerate a more hopeful future by incentivizing radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”

But if future risks have anything to teach us, it’s that we will be needed. And with time spaciousness, we can find our own unique ways to answer that call.

“If I don’t stand up for myself in the moment, I’ll beat myself up about it later.” The putamen is like a reality check on your future imagination. It helps you think more critically and strategically about whether the actions you envision yourself taking will in fact help you get what you want.

Try to find a news headline or story that makes you say, “Wow! That’s weird!” or “I’ve never seen that before.”

IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences, published an article under the headline: “Engineers: You Can Disrupt Climate Change; Decarbonization, Carbon Capture, and Solar-Radiation Management Will Provide Work for Decades to Come.”

When you think about how the world and your life will change over the next ten years, are you mostly worried or mostly optimistic? Rate your outlook on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is extremely worried, 10 is extremely optimistic.