The future is over – welcome to the everlasting now!

In one of his many cosmic speculations, the late musician Prince released a song “The Everlasting Now” in 2001, a track on an album entitled: The Rainbow Children. Art teases and invents traces of the invisible, expressing unnameable hints of other ways of being. Something you can’t see or feel if you are looking for the ‘mega-trends’, ‘mega-headlines’, fixated on tracing trajectories, obsessed with the clever calculation of where the artillery shells of planned futures will land. Boom! What (delusions of) power. Science and technology as purveyors of certainty, colonizers of tomorrow.

Of course, it is very seductive. What a relief to let the leaders and patent owners pattern what we see and do. What the heck, no big deal being complicit in weaving the present into a brittle and homogenized dance of the programmable. Tributes to the glories of yesterday, reverence for legacies that are deeply biased towards reproducing the past, dedicated to organizing life in ways that are vulnerable to pandemics and bereft of meaning. Maybe, instead, we can try to listen to the universe in new ways? It is playing many tunes, but what do we hear? Is it despair, pain and fear over the loss of what we know? Is it melodies of grand locks grinding closed, syncopated inhibitions that confine humanity’s greatest resource – our ability to imagine?

Or, might now be the moment to live this universe differently? As Bootsy Collins put it in All Star Funk “now all I want you to do is step-back…”.

Futures are not just lottery numbers for making bets and having an open mind does not mean buying many lottery tickets (multiple scenarios). We betray the potential of our imagination to illuminate and invent the present if we cannot be liberated from the tyranny of only using-the-future to win. Of course, exercising the imagination can make it stronger, but that strength can be applied to folly – a way of being that unintentionally destroys the conditions for human resilience on planet Earth by trying to control the future. By seeking permanency, we construct vulnerability. By attacking uncertainty, we become deaf to the creativity all around us.

This time around the strategy is to have no strategy, other than cultivating the capacity to appreciate change, constantly incorporating novelty (unknowable in advance), and then making bets that put values – including doing and not-doing – into practice now. This is an aspiration for a transition, granted – it won’t happen overnight, towards more spontaneity, improvisation, light legacies, polyvalent compost, generosity now – a fusing of modesty in becoming with a joy of being. Without knowing, or caring, if it will be a better future or not. Think of it as the everlasting now.

#futuresliteracy #futuresstudies