I’ve been thinking about the future since I was a little kid, not because I was particularly interested in defining it — or pushing it toward some version of “better” — but simply out of a deep-seated curiosity that I just couldn’t shake. I’m lucky to have converted this curiosity into a career, having spent the past 25 years working with some very talented people focused on giving the future some sort of shape. It’s been rewarding work, but as I come to the end of my first quarter-century of professional life, I’ve realized that no one is particularly good at thinking about the future. Now, when I say “good,” I realize that I need to add a bit of clarification. When people talk about the present, we tend to be very detail oriented. We demand data or evidence for any thoughts, comments or beliefs, and our conversations typically focus on our real, everyday experiences. But when we talk about the future, whether we’re casually chatting at a bar or trying to sound clever in a meeting room, conversation tends to swerve wildly toward extremes. In a guest essay for Times Opinion, which is adapted from my book, “Could Should Might Don’t,” I explain why this might represent something more than an annoyance. By pushing our thinking about the future out toward the edges, be it exciting and enticing or horrifying and dystopian, the future remains disconnected from the present, which makes it easy to ignore or dismiss. But the future will creep up on us all and we’ll absorb it into the patterns of our everyday lives. Change is coming (as it always is), but in order to make this change more grounded in reality, we’ll need to stop thinking of it as extreme and start thinking of it as mundane.
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