139: The Future, Summarized
Written March 25, 2025
Hi everyone, welcome back! Can you believe that March is almost over? This month we continue the Intentional Alternative series by exploring our cultural attitudes towards the future. Today, I’ll summarize everything discussed and highlight some interesting places where these conversations manifest in our culture.
The Future is Change
In post 136: The Future, I shared about the prophetic writings of Octavia Butler, a dystopian science fiction author, who in 1993 wrote a book called Parable of the Sower set in 2024. Reading the book is like jumping into a time machine and horrifically watching a fortune teller predict our reality today. The main character, Lauren Olamina, lives in a period that society calls “the Pox,” a sort of slang for the apocalypse. Climate change has brought drought and rising seawater. Middle-class families live in gated neighborhoods, fending off the homeless with borders and violence. Wildfires are commonplace. Public schools and whole cities are privatized. There’s even a Presidential candidate named Christoph Donner who is elected on the promise of dismantling wasteful government programs and whose campaign slogan is, no joke, “Make America Great Again.”
It’s an unsettling book that also contains an important, hopeful lesson. Change is an inevitable force. Once we accept that change is unstoppable, we can move from fearing it to shaping it.
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.” - Parable of the Sower
The Future is Stories
Our cultural attitudes toward the future and the idea that we can shape change are more powerful than we realize. In the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari makes the argument that our human ability to imagine things is the very reason Homo Sapiens rose in the evolutionary food chain to dominate the planet.
It’s commonly understood that the biological advantage humans have over other living organisms is our large brains. This gives us the ability to use tools, process language, and create complex social structures. However, Harari points out that many living creatures can also do these things. What makes humans unique is our imagination.
Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information…rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled…fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.
It’s sobering to recognize that storytelling is a uniquely human trait. All of the biological world, except for us, lives in a state of constant reactivity, responding to its environment. This function originates in the part of the brain that is responsible for our emotional flight or fight response. For most creatures, emotions are attached to a physical experience and when that event ends, the emotions stop. Human brains are different. We can hold information and elaborate on it with imagination. In other words, we don’t just experience life in the present moment. We craft stories about our past experiences and use those stories to make decisions that we believe will impact the future.
The ability to weave together tales has had a monumental impact on history - think agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions. These advancements were only possible because we collectively imagined a new path. However, there’s also a downside to this biological brain power. Threats don’t have to be real to shape our actions. The stories can be completely made up. They just have to be convincing enough that a large collective believes them.
Made-up and untrue stories seem to be fueling our culture of today. Credible news sources have become nothing more than fact-checking machines, exposing untrue stories told by crafty politicians. Corporations have convinced us to spend our time and resources worrying about trivial things that pose little actual threat to make a profit. People from specific identity groups are treated as scapegoats and blamed for all the misfortune of the privileged. Meanwhile, things that pose a threat like climate change are swept under the rug and labeled as a lie. It’s like the flight-or-fight response portions of our brains have been collectively hijacked by rancid stories. Knowing what’s real has become a difficult daily task.
Manifestation Moments
Here are some examples of places I’ve seen these ideas come to the forefront in the last month:
Yuval Noah Harari has been conducting interviews with media outlets warning about the threat of AI and calling for the development of global control mechanisms. In a conversation with the Economic Times, he warned that the course of history is about to change because AI can create stories, something previously reserved only for humans.
The stock market took wild swings this week due to speculations and stories regarding President Trump’s imposition of tariffs. It’s important to notice that investors’ response was not due to new information or hard facts related to economic changes. Rather, hundreds of millions of dollars were exchanged because of the belief in volatile stories that rapidly changed throughout the week.
On Monday, at my puppy class with Sonali, the humans in the room were reminded that dogs do not have morals. Our furry friends are not acting out of malicious intent when they bite our socks or pee on the floor. Rather, they are simply reacting to the current moment in front of them. We were cautioned that puppy training would be much easier if we didn’t invent stories for our K-9 companions.
The Intentional Alternatives
For me, this moment in human history feels like a tipping point. Imagination is the very thing that makes homo sapiens unique, but could it also be a tool of self-destruction? Maybe the future is just a result of which stories we tell and what we choose to believe in. Here are some key points and questions to consider in reimagining your relationship with the future.
Use fear to question reality. When you’re afraid or in moments of panic, take a deep breath and look around. Is there anything in the immediate moment to be afraid of? Is a tiger chasing you down the street? Is a bear lurking in the elevator? Do you need to fight or flee? If not, then maybe your evolved brain has imagined a story about the future. Identify the story.
Determine who benefits from the story. The tales our brains trick us into believing originate somewhere. Sometimes from our own experience and sometimes from outside influences. Figure out where the story came from. Who's telling it and who benefits from you believing it?
Imagine something different. If our current stories are not benefiting us, then it’s time to write new ones. To shape a different future we have to use our imagination and tell different stories. Stories that foster a sense of belonging, rather than division.
Next week, we will examine the magnitude and consequences of our story-making decisions with a new monthly theme. I hope you join me in exploring our cultural attitudes towards The Planet.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone who is a paid subscriber to this blog. In 2025, all content will be accessible to all subscriber types. That makes paid contributions even more special. It means that you see and value my work, even when you get nothing exclusive in return. Thank you. That is a living and breathing example of an Intentional Alternative.