“Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.” - Isaac Asimov
While writing this, my first real post, I got self-conscious about the potential embarrassment of making predictions. I mean, predictions are the stuff of mockery. You can quickly find listicles of bad predictions about technology, politics, economics, and sports. I don’t want to end up on one of these lists! In order to counter my insecurities, I spent time defining what I’m doing here.
I am here to present possible futures, not predict which ones will come true. I’m reacting to the present by imagining better futures than the various dystopias we hear about all the time.
Why engage my imagination in response to the present? I believe in the power of human focus - how we think and feel right now - to change our everyday actions and ultimately our outcomes. Beyond mystic mumbo jumbo and pseudoscience1 there’s legit research about the power of our attention, perception, and intention to impact our experience.
Stanford Neurosciences Institute explores how the human mind shapes reality.
A Harvard psychological study and a New York University neuroscience study on the impact of attention on appearance and attractiveness.
Placebo effect studies in medical journals including this wild one that put patients under and told them they had knee surgery when they hadn’t.
Even Forbes once posted Yes, Your Thoughts Can Actually Change the World about turning entrepreneurial thoughts into actions.
I truly believe in the promise and potential of humanity as the sum of its parts- billions of incredible human individuals. My optimism doesn’t make me naïve. I understand the plausibility of dystopian futures. I am afraid. I am not immune to doom scrolling, I have panic attacks, and I fear both failure and success, all the time.
I make a conscious choice to believe in a future that is better than my present day.
I used to make this choice as a survival mechanism for escaping a traumatic childhood. And because humans like to seek evidence for the things we believe, I began researching better tomorrows. I wanted to justify my imaginary futures with facts. There are reasons to believe that humanity is on the upswing.
War is now an exception, rather than a rule of everyday human life. Here’s a data-packed Visual History of Decreasing War and Violence. It includes this Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, saying “we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence”.
Life expectancy’s huge increase in the last 150 years is a big deal. Humans are healthier. In response to the climate crisis, we have achieved meaningful environmental milestones in the last 50 years; we are still actively improving; and we should not give up hope. Humanity is more literate than ever and the growth in literacy was a dramatic spike over the last 150 years, largely because public education became a government policy priority all of a sudden.
Several of these links quote Our World In Data. The research and data visualization platform exists to help us put our present problems into the context of our past, in hopes that we “make progress against the world’s largest problems.” Here’s a quote about the future from its founder, Max Roser, an economist at Oxford.
Solving problems — big problems — is always a collaborative undertaking. And the group of people that is able to work together today is a much, much stronger group than there ever was on this planet. … the world today is healthier, richer, and better educated.
For our history to be a source of encouragement, we have to know our history. The story that we tell ourselves about our history and our time matters. Because our hopes and efforts for building a better future are inextricably linked to our perception of the past.2
My optimism for a better future is based on the fact that humanity is capable of achieving betterment for ourselves and each other. Every individual human, you and me, are capable of contributing to utopian futures.
So, Utopian Futures is not about making predictions.
In response to current events, I will share my research about optimistic futures that are possible. I will showcase the individual and collective actions we can take towards those futures. And I hope more people will imagine less dystopian futures with me.
Some pseudoscience I enjoy: the water crystals supposedly shaped by human thoughts study and beautiful books are inspiring, even if the science isn’t all the way scienced yet.
“Proof that life is getting better for humanity in 5 charts” Max Roser. Vox.com. December 23, 2016.
Hear hear! I’m all for this. Stories create reality so let’s tell better ones.