How Can We Restore Faith in the Future?

Thank you to one and all who have reached out with kind words about The New Megatrends . It was a passion project for sure, and I’m so grateful that people are finding the content of interest and use. The idea for the book took shape during my first of many extended quarantines in 2020. The world felt so chaotic and uncertain in those early months of the pandemic that I suppose putting my thoughts down on (digital) paper was my way of pushing back. By connecting the dots of all we have been experiencing and putting them into something resembling order, I sought to inject a modicum of calm and control.

As I worked on the book, I kept returning to a core realization: The concept of the “future” no longer inspires hope for better days ahead. When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, my friends and I could hardly wait for the future to arrive. We all dreamed of zipping around the skies like The Jetsons and having Rosie the robot prepare our meals. Today, when people think about the future, it’s typically not with hope and anticipation but with dread. People are fearful of things getting worse. Of ecological catastrophe. Of the continued rise of the far right and extremism of all types. Of deepening divides that will further wrench societies apart. Of automation putting millions out of work. Of the next pandemic. In the United States, young people know their lives will be in many respects worse than what their grandparents and parents experienced—certainly, financially—and that is a big change from what previous generations expected. Instead of striving for better, millennials and Gen Zs are just trying to keep their heads above water. And many are failing through no fault of their own. Where once the future promised progress and hope, now it is cause for angst.

We can see the change in perspective by contrasting predictions made at the turn of the current century versus the one prior. In 1900, the Boston Globe featured an article by a writer named Thomas F. Anderson, who interviewed several experts to anticipate what the city of Boston might look like in the year 2000. Some of his predictions were prescient, including cell phones, central air conditioning, and nighttime baseball games played under the lights. Others—home deliveries via pneumatic tubes, moving sidewalks, the tides of the Boston harbor furnishing the city with heat and light—did not come to pass. What is worth noting about these predictions, though, is their optimism and steadfast faith that better times lay ahead. Anderson foresaw a Boston so beautiful that the word slum would be removed from local dictionaries. He believed that universal education would uncover genius among the lower classes and that the public health would benefit from the absence of soot and smoke.

Contrast the rosy predictions of Anderson and others in the late 1800s with those made in the 1990s about the (now infamous) year 2020. USA Today put together a collection of these forecasts, and while some were hopeful (a rising life expectancy, hydrogen-fueled cars able to operate for months on a single fill-up), the majority were not. Among other prophecies, experts predicted the death of books, the loss of privacy, the extension of the standard retirement age to 70, a rise in global surface temperatures, and heart disease and depression replacing lower respiratory infections and diarrheal diseases as the leading causes of sickness, disability, and death.

Cheery.

This premillennial gloom and doom was in keeping with the zeitgeist of Y2K. Rather than dream of a brighter future, as people had done a century earlier, we foresaw crises and calamities, aided and abetted by new and unfamiliar technologies. Rather than partying it up with friends as the clock ticked over to the new millennium on the last day of 1999, I was huddled on the couch with my dog, fretful that we’d lose power, access to ATMs, and public safety systems. Me being me, I recall being especially concerned about the potential loss of my hairdryer. I suppose that’s how humans cope with existential dread: We focus on the minutiae we can handle.

I’ve spoken quite a bit in recent years about chaos as the “new normal.” A critical reason we perceive a higher degree of chaos today is that we do not feel up to the challenge of meeting it. We are overwhelmed. We are exhausted. And we lack the fortitude that used to come from confidence in a brighter future. How can we expect to manage existential challenges—emotionally or functionally—when we are unable to draw strength from a belief in a better tomorrow? This pessimism is new—and far-reaching. For at least a century, society had embraced the notion that each generation would be better off than the last. That sentiment has withered in the past couple of decades, with the pandemic reinforcing the sense of gloom. A 2021 Pew Research survey conducted across 17 advanced economies found that 64 percent of respondents believe their children will be worse off financially than their own generation. In only two markets—Singapore and Sweden—did an optimistic view win out.

With political divisiveness blocking potential paths to progress, how can we feel confident that the necessary changes will be implemented to avoid catastrophe? We can’t be. And so instead, we wallow in uncertainty and fear.

I won’t pretend that this book—or any book—is a cure-all for what ails us as a society. I do hope, though, that it will start us thinking about what we can do in the now to ensure a better next. Obviously, that needs to include acknowledging and responding to climate change as the crisis it is. If we don’t solve that, how much will anything else matter? We need to get serious about reducing inequities of wealth, justice, and resources. We need to figure out how to retain the positives of social media while relentlessly scrubbing it of misinformation and hate. We need to stop allowing people to profit from seeding divisiveness and discord.

Perhaps most critically, we need to give our children and grandchildren reason to believe in—and fight for—a better tomorrow.

I would love to hear your thoughts. How can we restore faith in the future?