My Disrupted Life

Why do you think people are afraid of the future?

That’s a really good question. I think it’s because we have become unable to articulate a plausible future that we actually desire. Most of the visions of the future are very dystopian, very fundamentally broken in some way. There’s no place that any of us wants to go to, in any of these futures. But I believe, actually, that we are headed towards a future that is very desirable. Why can’t we see it right now? That’s a question that I don’t really have a very good answer to. I suspect it’s because in many ways it’ll look an awful lot like what we have now, in the sense that it’s not going to be spectacularly whiz-bang — and the kinds of things that will be special are things we have trouble imagining right now. I mean, I know for a fact that if we were able to get on a time machine and go back thirty years to describe to people what we have right now, it would seem completely implausible. And this is what I call the plausibility paradox in futurism. Any future that is going to be correct is going to seem to us implausible. And anything that is plausible is probably not going to be correct. So we have this dilemma that the future — while maybe desirable — is going to appear to us right now as implausible. And that’s the catch. If someone from the future were to come back now and describe it, we’d say, “that’s impossible.”

(Source: fndgs)