We are all refugees of time. The oceans that divide us are in our minds – and tides only turn in there.

If you're wondering how to feel agent as a new year stretches ahead, don't feel you have to completely hide from the hardest stories – or totally live there. It's the future you're really facing, and that you are helping all of us to write. Especially if you're able to stand with someone who feels they currently can't.

“It’s very easy to imagine how things go wrong. It’s much harder to imagine how things go right.”

So says elite business futurist Peter Schwartz in a new, hopey-changey, very Silicon Valley futures film.

What world do you want to make in 2024?

What story do you want to help to write?

“Narratives help inform us about who is to be trusted, who is to be feared, who is against us. Narratives help us cohere. They permit us to make sense of chaos, to create logic in the face of an otherwise untethered world.”

So says clinical psychologist, professor and author Hala Alyan. And she adds:

“They help us uphold dehumanisation; they help us dismantle it.”

One story has oddly muted me since the day after my birthday in the autumn. I’ve felt my throat tighten and my hands bind when I’ve looked at it. I’ve stared mutely at its staggering impact where it’s happening, and around the world. And I’ve felt for three months, whenever I dare consider it, like I’m trying to cry out in a dream.?

You know that thing? Where you forget you’re asleep and in the story playing through your REM cycle you’re trying to force your lungs to push a single sound out of you but it’s dream rules and if you’re lucky you hear yourself make a tiny dog whimper in the dark before the spell breaks and you come to.

For Palestinians, this might feel like a way of life. Without ever coming to.

Have you immediately flinched? Interesting.

The silence we’re implicitly encouraged to keep about this, if you and I have no Arabic or Jewish family, is I think part of the culture rooting Israel into the global modern imagination. It’s a nation so tied to the darkest results of culture war – Nazi extermination camps, industrially attempting to wipe out Jewish people with the tacit acceptance of millions of middle class voters – many of us feel a taboo in judging anything Israel does.

Germany did not keep its taboos. After the holocaust it took a big swing as a nation at teaching a new generation to face the psychology and root causes of antisemitism.

But we are creatures of context. Cultural, connected entities, emotions and imaginations always linked to the cloud, and who we think we are is shaped by many spirits of our age. Funny that our ideas become so immediately fixed when nothing on our living planet is not constantly moving.

“My generation and most of today’s American leadership grew up with the Israelis as heroic good guys and Arabs/Persians as greedy bad guys. Those of the younger generation… have a much more balanced view. Israel’s behaviour in their youth has destroyed whatever moral standing the Israelis had with them.”

In a series of open letters with Brian Eno ten years ago discussing America and Britain’s relationship with Israel and Gaza, German immigrant Schwartz tried to give a balanced view, but as he implies here himself , it’s hard to escape the narrative he grew up with. Especially, I would add, after a lifetime so successfully working at the top of the global system.

In feeling I must face this story in this first Unsee The Future expo of my year, I do so to make a point, try to set a course, starting with shining a small light on the most basic aspect of the killing of over 22,000 Gazans so far and over 1,100 Israelis since October 7:

This is a natural output of the story we’ve grown up in around the world.?

As natural a consequence as CO2 building up in Earth’s atmosphere from all our engines, or endless kilometers of ancient rainforest being cleared for palm oil and beef.

Zero sum values.

We were always going to end up here. And it’s not your fault. It’s just impossible not to be implicated.

But is it impossible to do anything with it?

Yes, if you can reframe it. Change the way you see it.

People in global leadership may seem to all think and speak and talk and move and not know how to dance the same, trained as they all have been in a very particular culture. But we all make culture.?

And there are billions of us not in the Ivy league.

So I ask again, what story do you want to help write yourself into in 2024?

What flag will you start by raising?

Fundamentalism with flags.

“When we fly a national flag, it is the intentions of its creators – of their time, their places and politics, not just our own, that we are raising. In doing so, we re-present both the nationalist project and the inability to see its history and consequences clearly. It doesn’t matter if the flag in question is that of the righteous or the oppressed” Chris Christou suggests .

“This is no more evident and no more obscured than as a result of war - a collective trauma that binds people together under a banner of both mutual survival and mutual destruction.”

Where do you feel in relation to the idea of conflict? Far away or front line? Speaking up or keeping your head down? Certain of your cause and people, or unsure where to help the war effort?

Do you simply wish we’d stop invoking the idea everywhere?

Part of my shying away from shouting about the nationalist violent rampage in Gaza is a bit of generalist’s reflex in me, muted by wanting to understand the context a bit more – namely, the counter experience. The Hamas attack that began this chapter of the story was a new level of shocking; more than a thousand people shot in their homes in one determined strike. And God, but the stink of anti-Jewish prejudice runs deep in the westernised mind. It’s weird and disturbing and I wonder how I’d live with it if Jewish. How used I am as a liberal European to the notion of standing against anti-semitism. For a couple of generations, this equated to supporting the modern political state of Israel.

For some of its representatives, that notion is a literal gold star of identity to pin to their lapel in the United Nations like a shield of righteousness.

A piece edited together by Max Blumenthal for The Grayzone shows some Israeli civilian responses to the country's offensive into Gaza, and it will disturb you as an outsider. Because it looks like a population that’s lost all psychological barriers to dehumanisation. Not in the middle of streets reduced to rubble but TikToking with the kids in SUVs in supermarket car parks.?

And I’m not easily sharing the live link to it because it feels like the real twitch underneath all this, the culture we’re really all in – the economics of outrage.

Are you ready to punk that story? Of old dollars and senselessness.

The insidious hook of the social media age is: Where does testimony for justice end and outrage clickbait begin??

Relief charities, news organisations or social media platforms – is it any wonder, in the ways we value money and perceptions of influence, that any of these can easily lead their behaviours and words and strategies down the same moral toilet vortex?

As Amnesty readily reports : “The business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights”. If you haven’t read Erin Kissane’s disturbingly well researched piece Meta in Myanmar it will make you turn cold at how casually all our families chatter around motivational self help memes on Facebook with genocide in the basement.

Bayo Akomalafe puts it chillingly : "The gentleman has always been indebted to the brutality of dungeons and unspeakable depths. The dungeon is the hidden curriculum of white modernity”

Putin supports Gaza. Biden equips Israel. Dictators side with refugee populations all of a sudden; kindly old uncles perpetuate stories of the vilest violence. Because they believe it helps prop up everything they hold very dear.

I observe a modern state of Israel that seems to have soaked up all the worst behaviours and psychologies of crumbling imperialism and poisoned itself with them. It hasn't shown the world a different way, it's tried to win the game, fed by our game-playing governments and continuing to feed the hatred of all those defining themselves against it.

What a homeland to have to believe in.

So what do you put faith in?

After my couple of visits to Israel twenty years ago, I left with a simplistic but sense-making view that the political entity of Israel has defined itself as At War. Just generally. Always in the background, always just under the skin. Banking on it. And that… would sow some dark seeds in the psyche, wouldn’t it? Despite how beautiful and bountiful Israel can feel on a sunny day with sparrows tweepling in the dappling street trees.

You can go see the death tolls to roll out of some of those streets in the last three months. And that’s before you hear any of the harrowing, stupifying personal stories from smashed hospitals, vanished apartment blocks, empty shops and piles of dead loved ones.

The genocides we condone. The genocides we ignore. If only such life-changing injuries were unusual. But we suppose, really, it’s normal. A price worth paying. For… what?

Yet. I’m not leaving you there.?

It’s January 5th. This is a beginning, not an end.

World disorder

Dictators and strongmen around the world seem raised to hope for total control, don't they? And they project it into everyone’s emotional ether. Especially now, and people are feeling it.

However, like a playground instinct, you could wonk the whole idea of fascism by seeing it as just FOMO. The fash of missing out, if you like.?

It makes handy simplistic sense of lots of the most destructive leaders in history. Hitler at art school, Keizer Wilhelm on the beach at Sandown with granny Vicki, Elon Musk bankrupting himself to control Twitter snarks… you get the horrifically silly picture. Or simply establishment-loathing Rupert Murdoch, a global story arbiter in chief who journalist Anand Giridharadas described as “one of the most destructive men on Earth” who, he suggests, “completely shredded the American social fabric… waging a war on democracy, pluralism, tolerance, love, justice… a lot of things I imagine a lot of people think are important values.”

“People’s brains have been broken en masse by a project for the inflammation of hate and misinformation” he said.

Why do any of us want to feel big if not because we feel small?

Are our brains broken? In a sense, they’re working – our minds and empathies are just very susceptible to that narrative context. The story we’re trained into thinking we’re in.?

Which is sort of wonderful, when you really think about that for a bit. It’s just a susceptibility that can also move us a long way outside more self-possessed boundaries of love. Especially if our emotional life gets smashed by something with a flag stuck in it.

Schumacker College and ASP sage Satish Kumar says to any of us who want to valiantly protest the war dollar world order:

“Act out of love and compassion not out of anger and anxiety. Without love and compassion you will quickly feel burnt out."

In the same well-funding looking film we started with, Ari Wallach says: “The Future isn’t a distant place, it’s not a noun – it’s a verb. It’s something that you make. If we are to move forward as a species we have to take collective action, plant trees who’s shade we’ll never know. That's it.”

People in all walks of life, privileged and not, are speaking as if feeling the emotional challenges of deep change. You are, I am. Your dad needs checking in on. Something going on around and inside us to wrestle with.

If, as Wallach puts it, we find ourselves together in a grand cultural intertidal – “an era of high chaos but also magnificent creativity” – change erupting all over the place that’s a long way from set yet, we should note that our own take on it helps to set it.

A key way to punk the old narrative is to picture our lives in the context of our ancestors and descendants. As we used to, before the story of the modern world seeped into us and gave us techbros and media barons who want to own everything everywhere all at once.

Wallach suggests that working up a long view of history doesn’t mean workshopping futures with post-it notes while artillery shells blast apart family homes a long way away. It’s more to do with considering empathy, he thinks. Feeling what the folks coming after us will likely feel.

He and you and me, none of us can do this completely outside our own cultures. We start where we are. The idea of academic objectivity is another myth of the modern age, so forget it. Bring what you have, expect to need a lot of grace and be prepared to give it as much, even to some of your ancestors.

If you want to feel agent about this year, wondering what you have with you that can help, what about asking yourself:

“What are my values, how are they showing me those who will come generations after me? What will help them feel like we all belonged to the same living planet?”

What might really sitting with this do to the way you see your place in Earth's history? And where you call home?

Palestinians want to be able to talk about futures. When you live under someone else's security control, any future gets defined, I am sure, as always lying beyond that. Which in some way locks in your identity to conflict.

In this, Palestinians represent the way our current world system values everyone and everything – if you're not useful to old power, you may as well be bulldozed out of the way. Your heritage, your truth, your richness means nothing. Your children's stories, the things that bind you together. Tens of thousands of lives, memories, roots to place robotically mean nothing.

It is a luxury to get to talk about futures. To imagine them. This is what we are shown in all the systems of privilege – you only get to imagine the future if you fit the one the system can imagine.

As Simon Ings says in his New Scientist article How cute is that!: “A species that plays together, adapts together. Play bestows a huge evolutionary advantage on animals that can afford not to grow up.”

We need to hold spaces for each other to experiment, play and tell stories. This is the opposite of war, of the economics of outrage. The current system will always uproot the black, brown, indigenous stories of us to harvest what it wants. And the systems of privilege will keep it happening without conscious thought from many of us, it's how this works.

Which is why consciousness feels like change. Perhaps why our times smell of it. More of us are seeing how it all connects – and this is the central principle of sustainability. We are all part of a living system, down through generations.

Aren't we all refugees in time?

Aren't those the stories to write in the sunshine and sing in the dark and play out in our streets that will help us help each other?

Aren't we all, therefore, part of the same exploration and not really lost?

Hala Alyan says: “My narrative of Palestine was built in diaspora. Built on the idea of a place that we belonged to regardless of whether we ever stepped foot there. ..Built on narratives of people abandoned by other people.”

As I’ve followed some Palestinian writers and comedians and thinkers, alongside so many Jewish voices decrying the dark story rolling out across Gaza, as I’ve watched so many solidaritous marches and protests for this issue, for those in Ukraine, and for wildlife and ecosystems far away from those protesting, I hear echoes through the unimaginable trauma. Signals of more of us wanting to face the truth – the truth of what the departing tide of our times is leaving bared on our shoreline with the micro-plastic and e-waste.

We need structural change. We have to challenge the very system we all grew up in – the culture of valuation we've let run everything. Because it's so fundamentally destructive and without soul it was always going to eat us. All of us. From the inside out.

Under the surface, not all ideas are what they seem. Ideas of nationhood, identity, justice. We will need conscious cultural skills more than any to make sense of our times and make a role for ourselves. Sometimes this will mean standing with one particular person or group’s experience as a symbol of the future you want to see.

In my privilege I may feel sometimes useless. A way to feel less so is simply to help amplify the voices of all of us who do not fit with the flow of privilege. The new and ancient songs and stories of us. This, I'm going to try to find ways to do this year.

If we are to empathise with people as yet unborn, we have to be capable of it with people just up the road. But it’s much more natural for us to do this than the story in your head might tell you. Because we don’t survive without it.

And it needs no elite ritual or Silicon Valley privilege.

Just like anything creative, all it takes is practice.

If you really want it.