Futurist As Therapist

Link: Open the Future: Greetings from Rüschlikon.

"Thinking about my presentation got me musing about the difficulty of imagining a future that's neither identical to the present, nor on the verge of apocalypse. Not a utopia, per se, but a future that gives us a bit more to hope for than to fear.

"I think it's because, to reverse Tolstoy, all unhappy futures are identical, but every happy future is happy in a different way. Unhappy futures, no matter their province – environmental disaster, technological doom, bird flu, peak oil, civilizational suicide-by-spam – are really about three basic fears: deprivation, pain and death.

(...)

"Sometimes, being a futurist isn't about making forecasts or spotting trends.

"Sometimes, being a futurist means acting as a civilizational therapist."

(((Hey wait! If he's right, then it's EASY! "Deprivation pain and death" – that's not just the eventual dead-certain fate of every mortal human being, that fate can even be predicted, with utter certainty, for entire civilizations! Maybe we're afraid of the future because, in the long run, it's where we all go to die!)))

(((That pretty much says it all in the futurist game, eh? Hmmm... I could sure do with a grilled ham and cheese sandwich right now... I haven't eaten one of those in so many epochs that the deprivation is hard to bear.)))