Will we all live in giant steel-hubs above the ocean?
Will we discover the Singularity and all our problems are solved?
What are We going to do day-to-day in 30 years?
The Spark
If you ask me how I came upon the idea of blogging about the future, I couldn’t exactly tell you.
I would answer that ‘this is not just something you bump into’.
One thing that contributed to this blog is that already in school I had a profound interest in history – it is everything that we are today.
It fascinates me so much because we can understand how the dynamics of humankind work, and we can use this to understand the future.
There is one lesson I learned about history – We need to make use of what we learned and apply it to what we discover to shape our future to be the best one possible.
The Corona crisis is the best example – we knew that around every 100 years there is a big pandemic and we could have taken precautions, but we didn’t – we didn’t apply history lessons to the future.
My Story
Since I was in school, I had a knack for learning about our future – engaging in long discussions in politics and trying my best to learn about physics.
I participated in many team sports which are (again) all about predicting your opponents next move. When playing the bass guitar (my favourite instrument) I always had to think of the next notes to play. Future was all around me.
And then came reality, and I went to university, got a very sophisticated job as a IT-Hardware salesman, made a few quick career steps and felt well about myself.
But I could never turn off the way I think about the future, even during my job planning out strategic initiatives to win over my customers even more. Eventually I was looking for a challenge to pump out my intellectual and creative capacities and found myself a way into this blog.
I live between Hamburg and Berlin in Germany, which are two marvellous cities (although Hamburg has the leeway here) and I fill the rest of my free time with reading and learning languages. I also have some family ties to the Buffalo-Niagara region and have been there many times.
I love to travel and have a few things on my desired places list – ranging from Japan to Peru to taking an extended road trip through the many US national parks.
If you ask me right now, what I would wish to get out of this blog it would be the following:
Travel around the world and attend local football games, and engage in discussions to work with local communities and organizations about the future, potentially inspiring the people around me to think more long-term than the short-term thinking culture that has captured our society for very long.
My Vision
What I can constantly see with people (and I do this, too) is that we are not good at predicting the future.
We see the future too much in the short-term and forget about looking at many of the long-term relationships, dynamics and effects.
This leaves the door open wide for misery caused by short-term reactions in opposition to a carefully executed plan crafted by long-term vision.
With this Blog I want to propose a new framework for thinking about the future – not exclusively with data, but also with human intelligence, academic research and sometimes intuition.
