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I never thought I would be an “events person”. Ask any of the people close to me, and they’ll tell you that I’m actually pretty introverted. But something funny has happened since I started freelancing. I’ve been feeling a strong call to experiment with in-person formats like casual meetups, paid workshops, and salon-style evening events here in Munich. And the response has been HUGE.

Last week I posted a reel about the latest of these events, a fun powerpoint karaoke-style bar evening called Rabbit Holes, and it sold out within 24 hours and has a waiting list that’s steadily growing. And just yesterday, I hosted an experimental workshop in the forest designed to help people think more clearly about the future. That event also fully booked out, which was pretty shocking to me considering I was asking people to meet a stranger in the woods and trust that I wouldn’t rob and murder them.

I started doing these things partly for marketing reasons: it’s great for my new little one-person operation to get out and meet real people, tell them what I do, and offer them something valuable. But there was something else driving me.

I’ve had my ups and downs with living in Munich and Germany in general. There’ve been stretches of time when if I could’ve easily packed up and moved back to the US, I would have. I’ve often felt quite isolated as a foreigner here, and like I wasn’t able to “participate” in the city as much as I would be able to back home. I’ll also admit that sometimes I can be a harsh critic of Munich as a less culturally interesting city: slower to adapt to what’s cool and new than American or other larger European cities.

I realized at some point in the last few months that the options aren’t just sit around and be unhappy with where I live or leave. I can also try my damnedest to make Munich into a city that I’m thrilled to live in. To create the things that I want to exist myself, instead of waiting around for someone else to do it. So that’s what I’m doing!

What to expect from this newsletter

How I’ve been operating so far is making an event, posting about it with an Instagram Reel, and letting the algorithm do its thing. It works pretty well, but it’s not great for community building. The people who want to be kept in the loop might not see it in time, and returners aren’t rewarded over new viewers. A batch of new people coming to every event is good for my personal reach, but it doesn’t make a community. So that’s what Munich in the Making is going to try to bridge.

What you get as a subscriber

• Event announcements before they hit Instagram

• A Munich thread in our community chat, to meet other attendees, find someone to go with, and keep conversations going afterward

• Recaps and some of the thinking behind each event

What paid members will get:
Sometime in the future I’ll turn on paid subscriptions. For Munich, that will mean:

• A few seats reserved for you at every event, so a sell-out never means missing out

• Announcements a day or two before everyone else

• Member discounts, and the occasional members-only gathering
  
  And because paid subscriptions cover the whole publication, you’ll also get everything paid members get on the Future in the Making side: the tools and extras that go with my writing there.

I’m really excited to see how this community grows. It’s only the early days, but it’s already been such a joy to see the warm response from people who see what’s happening and want to be a part of it. I hope you, dear reader, are one of them.

All the best,

I’m in methods mode this week as I gear up for my first public workshop! I thought I’d share a little sneak peek of one of the methods I’ll be using there. Even if we don’t get to sit together and run it, I think you’ll find it helpful. Enjoy!

How do you plan for your own future?

Likely, you don’t really. But if you’ve been feeling a bit disoriented and unsure of where you’re headed, it might be time to start. Today I want to introduce you to one of my favorite methods that I think works beautifully on the individual scale with just a bit of tweaking: backcasting.

The world of strategic foresight and futures thinking is full of frameworks, methods, and tools. Largely, they’re built for complex systems: multinational companies and multi-stakeholder projects. But the whole reason this publication exists is that I think futures thinking benefits all of us. Especially in a world where more of us are going independent and working for ourselves, we are the key stakeholders now. These tools can help us too: to be better long-term thinkers, to see our part in the bigger whole, and to orient ourselves when desirable futures feel unreachable.

Backcasting is generally considered to be the brainchild of John Robinson, and grew out of energy policy in the 1970s and 80s. Robinson felt that energy forecasts that focused on asking what the future would probably look like weren’t doing the job of getting us to sustainable systems. He turned the question around: start with the future you want, and then work backwards to figure out what needs to happen to get you there.

In the infrastructure context, the time horizon is usually decades out: 2050 and further. For something like a city’s energy grid, that makes sense. For a person, I think ten years makes more sense. It’s far enough out that real change is possible, and close enough that you can clearly see yourself. I have no idea where I’ll be when I’m 80, but I can make a pretty decent guess about what I’ll want at 40.

Why backwards?

Everything that brought you to this moment – all the decisions, detours, and lucky accidents – converges on one point: right now. When we plan forward from that point, we tend to extrapolate. We take what’s true today: our job, our city, our habits, our sense of what people like us do, and extend it a little further. The result is usually a slightly improved version of the present. That’s fine if the present is roughly where you want to be, but I think most of us aspire beyond that.

Backcasting starts from the other end. You place a marker somewhere you’d actually like to be, which may look radically different from your life today. From there, you look for the things that need to happen to get you there. It makes things that might at first feel pretty unattainable feel incrementally achievable.

The model

At its simplest, backcasting has four parts.

The 10-year vision. Picture your life ten years from now, as concretely as you can. Where are you? What are you doing? Who’s with you? Sometimes it helps to start by focusing in on a specific area, like your home life or your work.

If you want, you can also go big. Start with the expansive, whole-life vision, and then separate the vision into whatever buckets feel natural. They might not be the typical “life areas” things (like career, family, home, etc.), but I’ll bet they’re even richer than that.
The last time I did this, my vision fell into four categories: my body of work, my paid practice, my creative practice, and my community. As you can imagine, there was some crossover, but that’s fine. This tool’s ability to be flexible is a big part of what makes it generative.

Five years out. For the ten-year vision to be possible, what should you have accomplished at the halfway point?

One year out. And for the five-year picture to be possible, what should your life look like a year from now?

Now. Which brings us to today. What are some things you could do this month that seem small, but would send ripples toward that goalpost?

Two framing questions:

1. What takes the longest to get started?
   Some things just take time. Skills take years to build, savings trickle in, a big move takes big commitments. These things never show up on a one-year to-do list, because a year isn’t enough time to get where you really want to go. But that’s the reason they need something in the “now” column, even if it’s tiny. Sometimes that “thing” is just communication: sharing your idea with the other people it might impact and asking what they think.
   

2. Who or what does this depend on?

   Me: things within your own control, the things you can just run with and try out

   Us: things that need someone else’s yes, or a vision that overlaps with other people’s. That means you need to talk them through, and the sooner the better.

   Out of reach: things that depend on forces no single person can control, like the housing market or political shifts. Don’t build your whole future on these without alternate routes. This one is personal for me: I had a whole life plan that hinged on you-know-who not coming back into power in 2024, and when that didn’t work out, I was devastated and pretty lost.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it maps onto the zones of responsibility from an article I wrote called “How to deal with feeling responsible for the world”. One of the key points from that framework: zones aren’t fixed. Many things that are completely outside your sphere of influence can move inward with time. Backcasting is one way of doing that more intentionally.

What’s also really important here: your future won’t happen in isolation. It’s deeply intertwined with others’. The people around you have their own visions for what they want their lives and their world to look like. If you want those people in your future, part of the work is finding where your visions complement each other’s and building something even better, together.

Tripping points

A few things to keep in mind here:

Year one tends to fill up. If you’re like me, when you’re in this planning mode you tend to get really ambitious with all of the things you have to start ASAP. When I did my own backcast, my one-year column ended up with nine cards on it. That’s just not realistic. If the early stages feel really full, you might want to figure out how to break them down and move some pieces further out.

Your vision has a timestamp. You’re going to change, and your vision for the future will too. It helps to decide in advance how often you’ll come back and redraw it, maybe once a year, or whenever something big shifts.

We can’t control other people. Any step that depends on someone else saying yes has its own complications and risk. Sorting how your ideas relate to others will keep it from becoming a list that’s your way or the highway.

What helps with all three is treating each step as an experiment. Or, as I’ve started calling it, a proposal to the future. It might not work. You might change your mind. You might hate it once you have it. But you give it a go anyway, see what happens, and adapt. And because you’ve already thought through some alternative routes, a dead end just means you test out a different path.

Moving goalposts

Your life ten years from now will look different from the vision you conjure up today. That’s expected. Nobody can predict the future, including futurists. The goalpost still matters, because you need something to aim for. It gives you direction and clarity and makes the small moves feel productive. You just keep an eye on the currents, and let yourself be positively surprised by where you end up.

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If you have the space for a bit of reflection this week, consider giving it a shot. Now is a lovely time, as the leaves fall and the clocks move back.

Until next time,

I have a very exciting personal note for you today!

Read more

October is gearing up to be a busy month! That’s partly because I’ve been getting into workshop/event planning mode. The energy is there and the people are willing, which is what I want to talk about this week. Enjoy!

I’ve been dipping my toes into the events space: in two weeks I’ll be hosting my first paid workshop as part of this new venture, and a few days before that I’ll be co-hosting the second edition of Munich’s Breakfast Club chapter. The overwhelming impression I’ve had so far (which I already suspected) is that right now, people really want to go do stuff. Meetups, book clubs, crafting sessions, run clubs, day raves, whatever. Make it, and people will come. And by people, I also mean me. I love any excuse to get out into the world, meet people and do something tangible, especially since I started freelancing.

This phenomenon has been on nearly every trend radar for a while now. It started in the post-lockdown era, when people were desperate to escape the confines of their homes and feel human again. But those lockdowns are five years behind us now, and the trend is still building. It has its nuances, though. People are going out, but they’re not getting wasted and clubbing until 5am, and drinking in general has gone way down, especially among young people. We’re also not really hanging out. We’re not hosting friends at home for dinner parties or movie nights.

So what’s happening, and what does it mean? I have a theory.

Not attending, participating

As with any trend worth talking about, a few things are at play here. One is wellness. It’s probably largely another pandemic trigger, but it’s also an idea being pushed on us by Big Tech and Big Wellness: the notion that we need to take care of ourselves. Watch our consumption of all things “toxic.” Keep an eye on our biometric data. Nourish our minds and our gut biomes. Get comfortable saying no. Another is budgets. Times are tough, and drinks at the bar are pricey (even mocktails, which is a personal gripe of mine). But the biggest thing, and the one I find most interesting, is this: we’ve all gotten the collective ick about doing anything that feels performative.

We don’t want to be background actors in someone else’s Instagram Reel of a night out, especially when we don’t even enjoy clubs that much anyway. We don’t want to be spectators of someone else’s Main Character Moment. We want to be active participants in the world. And we want to do things that feel purposeful, not pointless. That makes it hard to argue for sitting around at a bar, and much easier to argue for a Sunday run club.

Big caveat incoming: I actually think going out, partying and having casual hangouts at home do serve an important purpose. Letting loose, making mistakes and having fun with other people without a program are essential parts of the human experience, and I worry that we’re losing them by demanding that everything have a functional reason to exist, a health benefit, a plan. The less we do these things, the more risky, awkward, and costly they feel. That’s how we end up in a world of all panic and no disco. And I think we desperately need more disco.

Hartmut Rosa, who I wrote about a few weeks ago, has an idea that I think explains why this matters. We tend to think of our energy as a budget: we have a certain amount, we spend it, and we hope to get something back. That’s the logic that makes the run club easy to justify and the bar impossible. Rosa argues that social energy doesn’t work like that at all. It circulates, and it’s created in the interaction itself. His example: you get home from work exhausted, ready to collapse in front of the TV, and a friend talks you into a game of football. You come home with more energy than you left with. The disco actually isn’t pointless; it’s one of the places where that energy gets made.

Rejecting cynicism

Alongside wellness and budgets, there’s another big force at play: disillusionment. So many of us, especially young people, have lost faith in institutions and their ability to make change in the world. That can easily lead to apathy and withdrawal.

But spun positively, I think those same feelings can lead to where we are now: people taking the future into their own hands, deciding that the only way to make progress is to get their hands dirty and just start doing stuff. Because we can’t afford cynicism. Hank Green put this particularly well in one of his videos: “I’m not being well served by trusting nothing.”

So we look to smaller promises, the ones where we can see the people around us making an impact. We look to Mamdani in NYC, filling potholes.

Mamdani and pothole politics

Mamdani performs, there’s no denying that. The man loves a little skit for socials. Remember when he announced a new Broadway ticket program in four different languages? He is communicating all. the. time. And don’t think he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing when he poses for selfies while cruising around on a rented Citi Bike. With a helmet, to complete the wholesome factor. But as Hank Green noticed, he’s very smart about balancing the show with the substance, the performative with the payoff. He’s nice, he tells stories, and he lets the high-profile stuff sing while the more boring work gets done in the background. And no matter which side of the political spectrum you’re on, you can’t deny something’s changing. The vibe is different. Even murders were down 23% year to date as of July.

Beyond being good politics, the communicating is what allows us to participate. Sure, the meme-ified side of that is all the “Mamdani, come fill this pothole!” TikToks (which actually get them filled, by the way). But I think what’s really happening is that it lets us feel less like spectators and more like stakeholders in the change. I’ve spent a grand total of two days of my life in NYC, and I feel invested.

Pressure valves

Small wins, even ones as mundane as a filled pothole, are a natural pressure valve. We see the results right outside our door, immediately. The futures thinker in me knows that small actions don’t replace the need for structural change and long-term vision. Band-aids on bullet wounds and all that. But the first might make us feel cared for enough to take on the second.

In general, I think it’s totally valid when those pressure valves are things just for us: the pottery class, the fancy fitness class. We have to show up for ourselves to show up for other people. But the consumption side of things is worth examining. If participation gets turned into yet another mass-market product, we have a problem: the latest and greatest brand of consumption.

That’s why I think we have to keep an eye on what “doing something” looks like in practice, and why I think having friends over to hang out is very much the kind of participation we need. It just shouldn’t be an elaborate dinner party with specially bought throwaway decorations because it’ll look great for the ‘gram (am I aging myself by calling it “the ‘gram”?). Not every time, anyway.

So here’s where I’ve landed. The workshop and the Breakfast Club are, each in their own way, the same gesture: here’s what I’m doing, come join in. I want to keep making things people can show up to, and I want to keep talking about them, because talking about them is how you let people in. But I don’t want every gathering to need a reason to exist. My hope is for a future where we’re still out there doing stuff, getting our hands dirty and taking our futures into our own hands, and where we also leave room for the breakfasts that turn into lunch, the scrappy potluck, the hangovers. That bit of hedonism is what keeps us feeling human, and it’s the one part of all this that nobody can optimize.

Less panic, more disco.

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So, what potholes are you filling this week?
What discos are you dancing at?

Until next time,

I’m a big fan of analyzing my own strategy to death. Normally I do that in my own notes/Notion/sticky notes/intrusive thoughts, but today you get to join me! Enjoy.

***the email version of this newsletter may be clipped.
For the best reading experience, use the app/web versions***

I never wanted to be a thought-fluencer, or any kind of influencer for that matter, but life (and the algorithm) works in mysterious ways.

I was bitten by the Substack bug in January this year. It started with an idea for an article that’d been buzzing around in my brain for a while, and I mostly just wanted to get it out to make space for other things. In the process of making that piece, I was reminded of how much I love long-form writing. I love to write with depth, to ramble, to tell stories, to start with a personal introduction long before I actually get to my point (can you tell?), and I immediately got hooked on the idea of having an outlet for that again with Substack. This escalated pretty quickly, and 6 months later I quit my job to go independent, with writing at the heart of a portfolio career.

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One of the snags I hit pretty early on, though, is that Substack really isn’t built for discovery (yet, they’re clearly working on that). If you want to build a following here, those people have to be brought in from elsewhere. And for me, the key “elsewhere” has been Instagram Reels, which by contrast is built almost ENTIRELY on discovery. Algorithmic discovery, as we’re all very well aware by now, runs on quick, snappy, engaging content that needs to yank people out of their doomscroll in the first 3 seconds. It’s not enough to make good content on Instagram, you literally have to make content that breaks through a brick wall of cognitive dissociation.

I loathe the word “snappy”. If I’m never told that I have to make my writing snappy again, it’ll be too soon. In the agency and corporate worlds, you’re constantly asked to condense your thoughts and work into snackable (another barf word), bite-size pieces for the already overstuffed minds of middle managers who have 5 minutes to read through the deck you’ve poured your working soul into for months. No paragraphs, just bullet points.

Now, as I’m devoting my energy to growing this platform into something that feels authentic and grounded and has actual depth, I’m again confronted with snap as the best way to funnel people into the place where depth can live. And it feels especially dissonant when the foundational values for my work here are getting people off of screens, out of overthinking, and making actual moves toward building the world we want to live in. I want to build a world where we don’t need the doomscroll dopamine hit, and yet I’m depending on the scroll to be seen.

I’m mortally afraid of making slop. But when the pressure tightens to keep going and keep growing, the words start dancing in front of my eyes.
Snap slop. Snap slop. Snap slop.

We’re all Content Creators and Content Consumers

Influencers as a primary career title are giving way to multi-faceted people who do other, real-world work and also show up online. I think most people with any sort of following these days don’t identify as creators, even. They’re designers, writers, gardeners, yoga teachers, chefs, etc etc. They just also happen to make content sometimes. Because, as I discovered myself, doing work isn’t enough these days. People have to see you, and the best place to do that is on algorithmic social media.

, the wicked sharp mind behind Scroll Sick, spoke recently on the ick most of us get when it comes to “building a personal brand” and posting online, and how easy it is, from the outside, to dismiss it as egotistical and “not real work”.

Carmen here gives us permission to do what we need to do, recognizing that this system wasn’t built with our best interests in mind, while still working in whatever ways we can to build something better in the meantime.

It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? To feel forced into posting into an online ecosystem that you don’t actually believe in, while also consuming content in that ecosystem created by others who probably feel the same. Which means a lot of what we’re tired of scrolling through is made by people who are just as tired of posting it.

The educational influencer is totally in

Lately, what we’re all making and scrolling through feels more lecture, less lifestyle. Fading are the days of polished aspiration and affiliate links to outfits, and in their place are mountains of explainer videos promising to help you become “disgustingly educated”, condensing “everything you need to know” into sets of 3.

And yet others are starting to notice that this new vein of educational content creator might just be 3 of your regular-old dopamine videos in a trench coat, dressed up to make you feel better about both posting and consuming them. Making you feel better without actually making your life better in any meaningful way. As Sarah of Futurelicious wrote in one of the pieces that inspired this article, “there’s a difference between consuming educational content and becoming educated”. Her main argument, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that we can’t just be sitting at home consuming educational content. We also have to get out of the house and live our lives.

I’ll admit that my ego, in many moments, loves the idea of being known online for my Big Smart Brain. Let’s blame it on an adolescence framed by the Gifted And Talented Education and AP curriculum that I and every other kid deemed “a smart one” were put through in the American public education system. I find it much easier to admit wanting to make people think “I wish I thought of that” than “I wish my life/my face looked like that”. But whether it comes from a ‘day in the life’ video or a ‘5 Substack articles you should read this week’ video, it’s still aspiration. One is just easier for me to swallow.

So after reading all of this and hearing all the other critiques that are out there, I’ve started to get rather nervous. The last thing I want is to make slop, even if it gets me attention. I don’t want to contribute to thought piece noise when so many people who already overthink just need a break. I want to help us feel better, get off our phones, and go do stuff that matters.

Need to know vs. come think with me

For me, the main difference between educational content that dissolves into slop and content that provides actual value is in the tone and intention.

What I want to avoid is making “need to know” content, the kind that promises that you’ll become disgustingly educated if you reach the end of it. It works by pushing the same psychological buttons as content that tells you what to buy or where to eat dinner. It’s a combination of lack and aspiration: I’m missing something, and you’re showing me how great my life could be/how smart I could be once I have it. In many cases it adds to the pile, making us more anxious and slightly less capable than when we started watching.

What feels better to me is content that invites: “here’s what I’m thinking about, let’s finish the thought together”. By contrast, this type of content doesn’t trigger lack or aspiration: it poses questions and invites people to answer with their own ideas. It’s vulnerable, and it creates the opportunity for a relationship to form by inviting the viewer/reader into the creator’s head, and showing a piece of themselves in the process. This type of content won’t have nice tidy answers, but encourages the type of reflection and critical thinking that might actually lead to us changing something or even better, doing something.

The internet has a tendency to “core” anything and everything, and I’m well aware that anything that gets put online runs the risk of becoming an aesthetic, getting condensed down and becoming a parody of itself. Especially when vulnerability and identity are part of the equation, that can get pretty gross pretty fast.

That’s why I think there’s another layer that’s really important: not just inspiring doing but creating by doing. Not stopping at philosophizing out loud and into echo chambers. For me, that’s been things like the Breakfast Club, which a few friends and I started the Munich chapter of last month, and the multiple workshops and in-person events I’m working on to bring people together in person.

It’s also a professional problem.

The career that I recently left was heavily focused on trend research. If you don’t know, this has become a massive industry in the last few years: businesses have become heavily interested in knowing what the next greatest thing that’s bubbling up will be so they can jump aboard. What that’s resulted in is an endless stream of trend reports: macro and micro, on any topic you can think of.

In many ways, it feels like a professional version of creating this “need to know” content, just in the form of PDFs and PPTs instead of Reels and Substack posts. While the thoughts in these reports can be beautifully aspirational in real, human ways, selling them en masse and in new iterations every year doesn’t really sit right with me. The idea, of course, is that businesses take these ideas and run with them. But the reality is that this industry is a lot of thinking and idea generating, and not a lot of actual change. For the people doing that thinking and hoping that something comes of it, this can be incredibly frustrating. It’s one of the reasons why I left: I started to really resent these reports and everything they stood for.

I’ve quoted this in other articles, but I’m going to do it one more time because it’s just so good. “We have to start getting in there and washing dishes”. That’s from Imandeep Kaur of Civic Square, spoken at the Future Days conference I attended in June. We have to unstuck from content and idea mode, at all levels.

From both sides

So let’s talk about the “so what.” How do I stop spiraling about whether I’m a thought leader or just another source of noise, and find some sort of orientation to work with?

I’m trying to limit my scrolling to a few short sessions a day, but when I do scroll, I want to be a little more critical of the content I’m seeing, whether it’s old-fashioned dopamine hits or new wave Smart Stuff. Is this making me feel like I’m missing something, or is it leaving me with a question of my own?

Turning the same question on my own work: am I making this to grow, or to add something? If depth is really what I’m after, is this piece going deeper, or just piling on? Getting followers and watching the numbers go up feels really good, I can’t deny that. But what actually makes me happy is hearing that something I wrote changed the way someone thought, or made them feel a little better about the world. I’d rather move the needle a lot for a small group of people than move it a fraction for a viral number of them.

And the honest answer is that no piece of content, mine included, gets to be the whole truth. What keeps invitation from becoming just another aesthetic is that it has to lead somewhere off the screen. That’s what I want more of for my digital life: less thinking out loud for its own sake, more doing things and then processing them with you.

Coming back to Substack: I really do see a place for that here. There are “only” 271 of you here currently, but knowing that a good number of you are actually reading all 2,000-ish of these words really means something to me. Thank you for trusting me with your precious inbox space, and I promise to keep doing my best to treat it respectfully.

So what do you think, did I explain explainer content well enough?

Until next time,

I’m trying out a slightly new format today. Consider it a mini-toolkit, something you can return to when you’re craving a bit of connection with yourself. Enjoy!

The Stranger Self

I’ve not always been the best about thinking about my future (ironic given it’s my entire profession now, I’m aware). I’m often pretty bad at doing things that my future self will thank me for, like working out and saving money. I’m also really impatient with myself and tend not to trust my own timing. It’s one of the things that I think originally attracted me to this area of research: the idea that there’s an actual, methodological approach to thinking about the world that’s yet to pass and how we see ourselves in it.

Research tells me that I’m not alone in feeling this way. One landmark study led by Hal Hershfield used fMRI machines to see what happens in our brains when we think about ourselves, 10 years from now. It found that our neural patterns more closely reflect the patterns for thinking about other people. And the more someone’s future self registered as “other”, the less likely they would be to value rewards that paid off later. But when people were immersed in images of their future selves with the aid of technology, they were much more likely to feel invested in their own future.

I feel really strongly that strengthening that relationship, making friends with our future selves, is more important than ever as we try to find our footholds in this weird, paradigm shift-y time we’re in. Not just for our own personal wellness and development, but for the development of larger society. If we all have visions of the people we want to be and the worlds we want to live in in 10, 20, or even 50 years’ time, we have something to work with and can start changing our actions to manifest that vision into reality. That’s how larger systems change happens: person by person, relationship by relationship.

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8 Questions

So for this week’s article, I thought I’d write out a few questions to ask yourself to get to know your future self. Use them in whichever way your brain fancies: as journaling prompts, shower thought starters, dinner table conversations, or framings for artistic practice.

1. Picture an ordinary weekday ten years from now. Where do you wake up, what do you spend the day doing, and who do you see?
   It’s much easier to picture the big, milestone-level moments in our futures: when we finish school, get the keys to our first house, have our first child. But I think the magic also comes in the everyday: the morning rituals, the mealtimes, the conversations. Try to imagine those, in as vivid detail as possible. Picture your clothes, your environment, the faces around you. Let the mundane be beautiful.

2. What’s a version of your life in ten years that seems unlikely and looks nothing like what you usually picture, but that you’d actually enjoy?
   We all know that Lennon quote, “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”. Try to project into one of those many possible lives that might get triggered by some unlikely but not impossible wildcard events. Maybe you’ve become a bestselling author even though you have no plans to write a book. Maybe you’re on a continent you’ve never pictured living on. It might be radically different, but what if it was also great?

3. Is there a future you’ve already ruled out for yourself? What convinced you it wasn’t possible, and who benefits from you believing that?
   There are a few too many voices floating around at the moment telling us all the things that our futures can’t possibly contain. If you’re a graphic designer, for example, you’re probably overwhelmed at the moment with discourse around your job not existing in 10 years. But what if you rejected those assumptions, those fatalisms that are coming largely from Big Tech? What if it was possible, it just looked a bit different – maybe even better?

4. What are you counting on staying the same over the next ten years? Your city, your health, your relationships, your line of work? What would follow if one of those changed?

   With something like this it’s easy to fall into gloomy thoughts: losing loved ones or losing our health. But if that happens, what else would change around you? How would the other relationships in your life change? Are you setting yourself up to be resilient in the face of unexpected hardship? Playing out the worst case can keep you from spiraling because you realize it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as you feared.

5. What habits or skills are you building right now that you’ll still be living with in ten years, for better or worse?
   How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and the things that are becoming ingrained in us now are those things that will be solidly formed in our future selves. Would you be happy if the habits you’re building now carried themselves into your future self? Are there things you’re working on building now that your future self will be grateful to have?

6. If a small choice you’re making today snowballed into something much bigger, what could that look like?
   Our futures are made of branching, swirling paths spreading out ahead of us. What decision that’s currently on the table will lead you down a path to an entirely different reality in 10 years? To a certain extent, this is knowable only in hindsight, but we do have some ability to project. What if a project you’re taking on or something you’re exploring turned into something massive with time?

7. Is there something that feels out of reach this year that could be realistic in five or ten?
   Sometimes the things we’d really want to see happen feel completely out of reach, because there are too many things that need to happen in between: systems that need changing, people that need to get on board, strategies that need building. If we took it as a given that our future selves could experience that change, what smaller thing would we start doing now to manifest it for them?

8. Who else will be part of your life in ten years, and do you know what they’re hoping for?
   Our future selves won’t be alone: they’ll be in constellation with friends and family both currently known and yet-to-meet. Ask yourself: what do the people closest to me want with their futures, and what do they see for mine? Where do we want our relationship to be in the future, and how can we best serve each other’s visions of the future?

If you only work with one of these questions, make it the first one. Try it once, sit with the image for a while, and try again later. This is an exercise I’ve worked with in various forms throughout my career, and it’s so simple and so powerful. The rest, do at your own pace, or keep in your back pocket for a moment when you’re feeling a bit discombobulated.

If you’re open to alternative ways of thinking about time beyond the linear, it’s nice to imagine that your future self, on some plane, already exists. And she/he/they are looking back at present you and with gratitude for all of the work you’re doing now to make their life possible. Isn’t that lovely?

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So what do you think? Is your future self a stranger, a friend, or a foe?

Until next time,

I’ve been feeling very woodsy lately, can you tell? I hope you enjoy strolling through some imaginary trees with me, the leaves are just starting to get golden and crunchy.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about roots lately. Maybe it’s because at the end of October, after seven years of living here and nearly two years after applying, I’ll finally be getting my German citizenship. It’s also a question that comes up constantly in immigrant-heavy circles: where are you from? When I introduce myself, it’s usually some version of “I’m originally from California, but I currently live in Munich”. It says something about my identity, neither this nor that. It also says I’ve been uprooted: I grew up in a different environment, and now I’m transplanted in soil that isn’t my own. Still nutritious, sure, but a chemical composition I’ve had to grow accustomed to.

In my darker moments, when I balk at the prospect of moving again and weigh it against the equally frightening idea of staying here forever, it often comes down to this idea of putting down roots. When I feel a bit lost, I can trace it back to the sense that I haven’t committed to this place fully yet. I still have one eye on the horizon, imagining that somewhere else might be better. I hesitate to “put down roots” here, because that feels final, much more permanent than I feel ready to be. Even my incoming German passport, when I’ve talked about it: I’ve framed it less as permission to stay in Germany than a free pass to move about the EU in a way my American passport doesn’t allow.

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The flipside is that there’s a part of me that longs to find that one place I can fully commit to. Putting down roots could allow me to grow fully into something. And there’s a beauty in that, too, a beauty that’s lost in most cosmopolitan narratives. Knowing a place so intimately in all its details and all its forms and changes. Small, silly things, like knowing which brands to trust on the store shelves. But also being so committed to a place that you’re willing to invest in it, to give yourself to it and spend your resources to remaking it just a little bit in your image.

That’s my starting place, and I have the feeling it’s a familiar one for a lot of you, whether or not you’ve ever made an international move. My urge is to reject this dichotomy we’re presented with: put down roots, or make peace with a life in motion. I’ve been chewing on that for a few weeks, trying to find an answer: a lot of it among trees, first the Sierra Nevada forests I grew up with and now the Bavarian ones I’m still getting to know. And the longer I think about roots, the more I suspect the problem might be the metaphor itself.

So I’ve been poking at it, testing where the metaphor stretches and where it breaks. And when it breaks, looking back at our planet’s history for something much more ancient that might suit us better: not trees and roots, but fungi and lichen.

Nothing and Nowhere

What strikes me about the old question, “where are you from?”, is that it was never really about the person being asked. It was about their people, their village, their story. You were located by everything around you. Somewhere along the way, we stopped being located that way. The sociologist Ulrich Beck described this as individualization: modern life released us from the ties that used to tell us who we were (class, family, church, the place we were born) and handed us the job of building a self from scratch. There’s real freedom in that, but it also sets us up for loneliness.

If nowadays we feel so lost, so unmoored from our senses of self, how can we frame that in a way that helps us navigate it? To me, it goes back to the shape and form of the digital spaces we live in. recently introduced me to the theory of “context collapse”: the idea that our increasingly digital lives are increasingly devoid of context, popularized by Goffman and Meyrowitz. So much of the color of our lives now happen in the same place (our news, our entertainment, our work, our friendships) and all of it is visible to everyone, from our parents to our coworkers. When that happens, we risk collapsing too, and going flat. When we are everything for everyone, everywhere, we are nothing and nowhere: a shapeless uni-context. Questions like “where are you from?” lose all shape when we spend our lives in a digital non-place, and suddenly one of our oldest ways of understanding people no longer applies.

I think this is why so many of us feel uprooted, whether or not we’ve ever moved. And it’s why the two options we usually get feel so thin. Put down roots and commit to one place, or embrace the freedom of a life in motion. In either option, we’re still imagined as a single organism, choosing where to plant itself. What I’m beginning to sense is the possibility that the problem isn’t where we are, but that we’ve come to think of ourselves as just one entity, standing and moving alone.

That’s what roots do as a metaphor: they link us to place, to the people who came before us, and to each other. They establish our mythology as humans.

Through the concrete

There’s a good reason that roots have become synonymous with place- and myth-making. As a visual, they’re stunning branching pathways that spread and climb and meld with the world around them. We quite literally see ourselves in them: our blood vessels and nerves, the pathways that allow us our basic human functions, look beautifully similar.

If we think of roots as something that digs deep into the soil, anchoring life firmly in place, they can feel stodgy and restrictive. But roots in many cases don’t really work that way. They go wide as often as they go deep, spreading out and interlocking with other life forms.

In fact, roots are amazingly stubborn in their mission to spread, to find nutrients and make connections despite the obstacles. When I was in Los Angeles this summer, I found myself smiling and thinking “you go, tree” every time I came across a patch of concrete sidewalk slab thrust into the air by a determined ficus.

Perhaps even more helpful as a story for our own fluid identities is this idea that roots are not by default the result of sowing seeds. Any houseplant enthusiast can tell you that dividing a plant at the roots is often the easiest way to make new ones. Robin Wall Kimmerer brings us another example from Indigenous knowledge:

This means that we, ourselves, can act as the carrier of roots, allowing them to multiply and divide, and bringing them with us wherever our journeys want to take us.

But still, I find myself wondering: are roots really the best way to talk about this fundamental need of ours, to answer the questions we struggle with in terms of feeling grounded, whole, and part of something bigger? When we talk about our own roots as if we’re a tree, a single organism bound by our own abilities, I think we risk going right back to that place of feeling stuck and limited, forced to find one place to transplant and let depth come.

What came before roots?

Philosopher Simone Weil was also a firm believer in this relationship between roots and a healthy relationship with the self. But roots, to her, don’t speak solely to the mythology of the self.

Essentially, Weil is arguing that we cannot think of roots as a standalone organism, just as we cannot think of ourselves as standalone beings. We can’t untangle our selves from the ecosystems in which we live, and the symbiotic nature of our worlds that give and take and grow through and with one another.

When I think about symbiotic systems in the natural world, the first thing that comes to mind is mycorrhizal networks, also known as fungal networks. 80-90% of all land plants rely on these networks for water and minerals, and the networks in turn get sugars passed down from photosynthesis through roots. These networks represent one of the original symbiotic relationships in our natural world, going back hundreds of millions of years. Plants evolved from green algae, and it was their partnership with fungi that let them leave the water and survive on land. The fungi did the work of roots long before plants had any.

This makes me think: what if we stopped too early in our search for the perfect metaphor? What if we should’ve looked even deeper into time, into the ancestry of our planet itself? I won’t pretend to be the first person to bridge some connections between fungi and futures: there are some amazing thinkers like at Sporesight that are doing beautiful work in that field. But for me, in my own quest to find a way to think about my own sense of self and my place within the world, this really struck a chord.

Fungi come in a vast range of forms and colors. Once you start looking, you see them everywhere. My personal favorite is lichen. Lichen, often mistaken for a plant, is its own special sort of being. Actually, lichen isn’t even really a “being” in the traditional sense. It’s a fungus living with a photosynthetic partner (usually a green alga or a cyanobacterium), and in many lichens, scientists have recently found a third partner, a yeast. It is, down to its very core, a living relationship, a plurality.

Lichens are pioneer organisms. They take hold in the most seemingly inhospitable places, like bare rock cliffs, and flourish. They slowly break down the rock itself, leaving behind the first bit of soil that others can live in. In that sense, I’d say they’re even more stubborn and resilient than those fig trees in Silver Lake. On top of that, they come in an unbelievable array of form and color. Simply put, lichen is really, really cool.

Making soil

What I want to think about now is where to go with this: how can we play with this image of fungi or of lichen in a way that helps us, that aids in our own desire to feel “rooted”?

There’s a lot of ground to play with when we think about this thing that’s not really a thing, but a partnership, a living example of symbiosis. We can ask ourselves: who am I in symbiosis with? How can I connect with a place that I not only draw from, but draws from me in return? Is there a model that allows me to do that in way that feels both honorable and freeing, in a way that so many of us need in 21st century cosmopolitan life?

Which brings me back to the passport. For months I’ve been treating it as a question about roots: either it’s the moment I finally commit to staying, or it’s my ticket to keep one eye on the horizon. But if I take the lichen seriously, the question changes. When I look at my seven years in Munich through that first question, who am I in symbiosis with, the list gets more interesting: the people I’ve met and worked with, at my jobs or now in my role as a freelancer, my friends, my new family. Those are partnerships, and they’re mine whether I stay another seven months or seventy years. Maybe that’s what the passport really marks, less a promise to a place than a record of a relationship that’s been slowly making a little soil the whole time.

That’s what I’ll leave you with for today (I think it’s plenty). I’ll be letting this simmer this for a while, ideally in the places where lichen actually grows whenever I get the chance. But expect more play, ideas, and maybe even a Working Model or two to come.

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So what do you think? Would you feel good about committing to a life of making soil, wherever that takes you?

Until next time,

Today we have a personal little essay based on something I took part in a few weeks ago. As this platform grows I hope to have more “field notes” style pieces like this. Getting into the real world and experiencing change firsthand is a huge part of how I want my practice to work, so I really hope you enjoy reading about it.

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Into the woods I went

Two weeks ago I took the train up to Kulmbach, a smaller town in Upper Franconia, to take part in a 5-day research retreat in the forest, “Forest Futures”. I thought I was in for a few days of reconnecting with nature and learning some new ways to think about the future via the forest.

But the reality was radically different from anything that I could’ve imagined. Now that it’s over, I’m left with this lingering feeling that something really important just occurred. It felt like a taste of what life and work could be like, if we decided it was worthwhile. Of what research, and practice, and community, and problem-solving could be. It made me wonder what new models we could come up with, and how we can find the infrastructure of support needed to make them real. I know that sounds big and dramatic, but let me explain.

For context:

A few months ago I was scrolling Linkedin, and amongst the sea of generated business jargon and self-congratulation (I’m not a big fan of Linkedin these days, can you tell?) a post caught my eye. It was an open call for researchers, specifically people who had a perspective on the future, and a pull to broaden that perspective through a particular plot of forest on a generationally-owned piece of farm and forest-land.

At the time, I was very freshly freelanced and actively looking for opportunities to get myself out there and meet like-minded people. So I applied. I didn’t even really expect to be accepted as someone so new in their solo venture and non-instituationally affiliated. But I applied anyway, in the name of experimentation. And lo and behold, they wanted me!

I do have a deep emotional connection to nature and forests. When you grow up in Central California with Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas in your backyard, that comes quite naturally. But I haven’t quite developed that same connection to my new home. In the German Alps the trees are different, the smells unfamiliar. I always feel a little too close to civilization, to highways and cell service. I saw this as a good chance to develop a stronger sense of kinship with my new home.

The organizer Anna’s family property is called Kubelíkhof, after their family name, and sits in the very small village of Feldbuch. With us on the retreat were 6 other participants and Anna’s mother Gudrun, the current caretaker of the farm.

In a very packed 5 days we explored the forest with the guidance of Gudrun’s assigned forester (a very German thing, to have a government professional assigned to oversee private land). We walked barefoot, blindfolded, hugging trees and immersing in the scents, feel, and sounds of the forest. Each of us contributed to the thinking in the form of lectures, workshops, and co-creation sessions. We mapped our thoughts and spent a lot of time speculating on what they could evolve into.

Washing the dishes and planting the seeds

At Kubelíkhof there are specific problems that are raising big questions for Anna and Gudrun. Climate change is causing a number of issues like invasive beetles, disastrous tree-felling storms, and increasingly strong and long-lasting periods of drought. Farming and forestry is not the lucrative business it once was. Many people are leaving the area, selling their land and giving up generations of heritage. Among those who stay, there’s a pervasive sentiment of discontent and politicization that’s making it difficult for any newcomers to build a life there, especially if they’re more left-leaning.

These were the very real, very tangible issues we were presented with that framed Forest Futures. For many of the hours we spent workshopping and speculating, Gudrun was there with us, providing her very grounded understanding of what her land needs and what’s happening within her community. Even though we all had just met her and Anna, I sensed we all felt this very real, emotional pull to give everything we had to offer and to take it seriously. I think no small part of what hit me so hard emotionally about the whole experience was that it reminded me of my hometown and my own family, which in many ways is experiencing similar challenges, and how much it would mean to me to have a whole group of people there dedicated to finding solutions to make the future there a little better.

Throughout the experience, I kept hearing the voice of Imandeep Kaur, a speaker at Future Days, a conference I attended in June. She said “someone needs to get in there and start washing dishes”. In the futures world we spend a lot of time thinking big: trying to understand massive, complex, interwoven systems, and how we can solve for the wicked problems that envelop them. This was not that: it was one family, one piece of land. That doesn’t make it less important, though, it makes it much more likely that we actually could get in there and get some dishes clean.

Embodied, relational research

When you’re my flavor of researcher: AKA a researcher that spends most of her time reading, looking things up, and trying to build an understanding of something you can’t directly access- you spend a lot of your time alone, sitting at a desk. This was exactly the opposite of desk research. We were blindfolded in the forest several times, and were asked to listen and touch and smell. We had Gudrun with us showing her various implements to keep the saplings away from greedy deer and wild boar tusks. The forester even made us little treats from the woods: syrup made from fir tips (DELICIOUS, by the way) and jam made from red elderberries.

Beyond the actual learning and working portion of the trip, we ate every meal together. We took part in the cooking, which often included produce from Gudrun’s garden and nearby orchards. We bunked together in the farmhouse. We had bonfires under the stars. All of that created knowledge that now sits inside me and my cohort-fellows. It’s knowledge that is fundamentally, epistemologically different from anything that we could learn from reading, surveying, or (god forbid) asking an LLM. It’s what created the foundation for that emotional pull that motivated us to take the work seriously.

Finding the Feldbuchs

As I said, I needed a lot of processing after a very full 5 days. That’s why I’m only getting around to this now, two weeks later. But having had some space, here’s what I’m thinking about:

Is there a fundable, repeatable model for purposeful collaborative research, the kind that bridges research and practice, researcher and practitioner? Can it be accessible, outside of rare instances of academic funding?

If the model exists, I’d say the model is currently in the prototyping phase. Most retreats these days are centered around personal development and wellness, and they cost a pretty penny. Infrastructure and funding is no easy task. In this case, there weren’t so many barriers: the farmhouse had space for us, and aside from food and travel costs, it was relatively affordable. But for many of us it meant taking time off work, and it’s not an income-generating activity which can be hard to make time for. Discovery is also a hurdle: how do we find the Gudruns and the Annas of the world, if the Linkedin algorithm doesn’t serendipitously present them to us?

If we build it, I really believe that people will come. So many of us, myself included, are desperately seeking ways to contribute to something meaningful, to contribute their skills to something that goes beyond a powerpoint presentation. We want to get our hands dirty, to build deer fences and toss acorns into the forest to see if they seed. To find those small acts of agency that tell us that we can still influence the future.

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Special thanks to my new friends Anna, Gudrun, Agata, Elena, Nate, Jen, Tina, and Franca for making this such a memorable five days and more magic to come!

Until next time,

As I start to think more about what I want this publication to be, I feel a strong pull to start adding more content that concretely addresses needs and worries, with real, tangible things you can do. This essay will be the first of many more of its kind, so I hope you find it helpful.

Where do we go when everything is burning?

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about how overwhelming and scary it can feel to try to plan for your literal, physical future when it feels like the whole world is burning. This is something I’ve dealt with firsthand: I left California amidst heavy wildfire smoke and the fallout from the first Trump presidency. Now, here I am in Europe, with drought in my backyard, wildfires burning in neighboring countries, and a growing number of neo-Nazi seats in our parliaments. That article ended more with sympathy than anything else, and that’s been on my mind since. I want this publication to be a place that gives you tools to think and find hope amid a very complex landscape of problems. While part of that is empathizing with one another and articulating frustration, I want to build up the part that’s more focused on tools: here’s the problem, and here’s a way you can act like a futurist and start digging up the solution.

So that’s what this week’s edition is going to tackle. How can we face the question “where should I move that’s still going to be livable in 10 years? 50 years?” with actual strategy?

It’s still not simple. No 2x2 matrix is going to solve this one for us. And I recognize that this takes time and intention and work when many of us find those things in short supply on a daily basis. But I’d like to throw something into the ring anyway.

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Why is it such a difficult question?

First, some framing: I think two reasons why this task is so daunting are 1) the systems we’re talking about are very complex, and some are easier to forecast than others; and 2) no place is perfect. Utopia doesn’t exist, and we won’t manage to build one anytime soon (or perhaps ever, if you listen to writers like Le Guin). Finding a place to put down some roots for the future means both seeing what the future of that place might be like and recognizing that this future won’t be sunshine and rainbows. There are real problems to solve and jobs to be done everywhere. The point is to figure out which place has problems that feel personally tackle-able for you, and like a cause that you’d want to contribute to.

In my last essay, I also talked about exit fantasies and the problems with them: I won’t entertain the idea of retreating to the woods and outside of society as a viable option for most of us, because it leaves the problems of the collective behind. The better version, I think, is to treat any move like a prototype: testing out what new models of life, home, work, and community could look like, and sharing with the class. That’s also what I’m talking about here.

How to frame it

The whole point of this exercise is to be able to answer two questions for each place you might consider moving to:

1. what could a good life look like here? what possibilities would it create for me that align with the kind of life that I’d love to see myself living?

2. What challenges/jobs/hurdles would I have to take on to make this place stronger for the future, and to be a contributing member of the community? Am I willing to take those tasks on? Am I well suited to take those tasks on?

Both of these questions need you to have your futures-thinking cap on. It’s not about what place is good now, or has problems now, but what place could offer or need something in the future. You won’t have 100% clear answers, but that’s an ambiguity we need to start getting comfortable with sitting in.

Let’s start by having a look at the big factors that will influence whether an area will be right for you in the long-term. I resisted the urge to make it a PESTLE analysis (some business goggles are hard to tear off), but it does come close: Climate, Economic, Social, Political, and Relational.

• Climate

  • How will this area fare in terms of resiliency in the future?

  • What types of climate issues will this area face assuming a baseline global temperature rise? What catastrophic events?

• Economic

  • Is there economic opportunity there, or does it need to be brought in?

  • Are there any looming threats to the economic stability of the area?

  • If everyone in my economic class moved there, would it create hardship for locals?

• Social

  • Are there big social tensions here that need to be solved?

  • Will this area’s core values mesh with my own?

• Political

  • Is the political system stable, or at risk of devolving? How is the projected state of democracy?

  • Are there deepening ideological divides within the community?

  • How easily could I politically participate here?

• Relational

  • Do I know anyone there or would I be starting from scratch? Might anyone be willing to move with me?

  • How much of a culture shock would it be? Do I have to learn a new language?

  • Do the locals want me there?

On Non-Negotiables:

When we think about where we want to live in the future, we’ll all have some non-negotiables, and they’ll all be personal. When I say non-negotiable, I mean things that might jeopardize your personal safety: like laws or extreme prejudices against race, religion, or sexuality. I also mean political non-negotiables: if you can’t move somewhere because of passport restrictions or huge hurdles with your area of expertise (i.e., practicing medicine in foreign countries), that’s something that should immediately strike an area from your possibilities list.

Non-negotiables are not cons, undesirables, or inconveniences. That can be hard to swallow, but that’s exactly the point of this exercise. For example, I would love to say that living somewhere without a large population of far-right aligned people is a must. But that excludes my home region and, lately, a large portion of the land here in Germany. I think I need to consider whether it’s something I can tolerate, and if it’s something I can consider as a job-to-be-done: trying to tackle political polarization and ideological divides. Because I believe it’s super important work that someone has to do, I should consider whether that “someone” could be me, or whether my skills are better suited elsewhere.

The exercise

So with all that in mind, here’s what I’d do. I’d get together with my partner and anyone else I might want to live with in the future, and I’d create a space for my explorations to live: maybe it’s a Miro board, maybe it’s a Whatsapp group, maybe it’s a big sheet of paper with markers and sticky notes.

Step 1: Make a List

Start by listing out all the places you have floating around in your head as candidates for potential moves. In my house, those places are typically Munich (aka sticking around), California, the Pacific Northwest, the Northeastern US, the Great Lakes Region, Norway, Sweden, and Ireland. All of those appeal for different reasons, and they come from our personal repertoires: places we’ve lived, places we’ve visited and liked, or places we’ve heard would be a good match for us. Places you’d end up for very pragmatic reasons, like being near aging family or property, should also go on the list.

Maybe you have no idea yet, and are looking for inspiration. In that case, I’d start by looking at some of the existing resources that are out there (though keeping in mind that most of these are for the current state of things, not the future):

• AlphaGeo’s “World’s Most Climate Resilient Cities” Index

• EIU’s Global Livability Index

• Monocle’s Small Cities Index

• Gallup’s World Happiness Report

If at any point you run into a non-negotiable, chuck it. Don’t spend more time in fantasy than you have to when you’re trying to move towards an actual decision.

Step 2: Go Digging

Then the fun part (or at least in my brain) starts: research! Start doing some digging into your list of cities. You can divide and conquer amongst your group if you like. Look for answers to all of the questions across the different categories. There are a number of places you can look, depending on what kind of data speaks to you and how you like to get information. Consider:

• news publications local to the area you’re investigating: What sort of issues are they reporting on that might continue/escalate in the future?

• social media: every area has its influencers and content creators talking about how life is evolving there. Hunt them down. It’s not everyone’s favorite, but reddit is also great for this.

• data aggregators and indexes: research bodies putting together data, scores, and metrics across many domains. Here are a few more you can start with, in addition to the indexes I linked earlier:

  • predicted shifts in climate by region

  • global data on migrant integration (aka “how easy is it to settle here”)

  • global economic growth projections

• City/State planning publications: what do their own leaders have in mind for the future of the area?
  
  A big one that might need a bit more time: asking locals! They’ll be by far your best source of information on how the future of their area might play out, and what their aspirations or visions for the area are.

Step 3: Reflect

Once you’ve been digging for a while and feel like you have a good overview, go back to those two questions I mentioned in the beginning:

1. hat could a good life look like here? what possibilities would it create for me that align with the kind of life that I’d love to see myself living?

2. What challenges/jobs/hurdles would I have to take on to make this place stronger for the future, and to be a contributing member of the community? Am I willing to take those tasks on? Am I well suited to take those tasks on?

This isn’t the kind of research that should be done quickly. It needs time to simmer. The goal of this isn’t to come out with a concrete answer; it’s to give you a few places you can keep a closer eye on and start considering more seriously. But I think if you do it right, it can actually be a really hopeful activity. I have a litmus test for this: is it something I could turn into a girls’ night in my living room with wine and snacks? In this case, I could absolutely see it.

Once you start to narrow in on some options, the real planning work can begin. This is where futures-thinking tools can also come in handy: things like scenario building, prototyping, backcasting, and adaptive pathways. But I’ll save that for another time.

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I’d really love to hear: how would you like to do this exercise? With a spreadsheet, or over a glass of wine (or both?) And where are you thinking about moving? What jobs can you see yourself tackling?

Until next time,

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with friends, old and new, about how tired and stuck we feel in a time when every institution feels like it’s crumbling around us. Do we try to keep on patching the holes, run for the hills, or do something totally different? That’s what I’m chewing on in this week’s article. Enjoy.

When we’re just not feeling it anymore

For a while now, I’ve been feeling pretty disillusioned. Disillusioned with the future and with the institutions that were supposed to uphold it: companies giving us a career ladder worth climbing, governments working towards my better interests and helping to catch me when I fall. Disillusioned with any idea that we weren’t all doomed to the fates of AI takeover and climate collapse. It’s one of the main reasons why I left my agency job this summer: I just didn’t believe that working for large multinational corporations would ever be fulfilling or move the needle in any real way.

In fact, I was so burnt out and distrustful of the entire field of knowledge work that I strongly considered leaving it entirely. I had the burning feeling that just doing something tangible for someone to make their days (and by extension, lives) a little better, like by making them a coffee, would feel more value-aligned than the realities of my desk job.

After a lot of thinking, though, I realized that I would be doing myself a disservice by withdrawing and rejecting the skills that I’d worked so hard to cultivate. I decided to give it one last try, just on my own terms: starting my own practice, one that could be built around my own visions for the future and my own beliefs about what it will take to make them real. And I get really excited when I think about what it could mean if more of us did this: prototyping better alternatives, and sharing what we find out. Because there’s a real, vital difference between getting yourself out and building something that other people could copy.

Mass disillusionment

It’s safe to say that I’m not alone. Disillusionment is an epidemic. Trust in the US government sits at an all-time low. Africa is the only continent currently having enough children to keep its population levels. 57% of us expect to be financially worse off than our parents.

The withdrawal has already started: a growing share of people are leaving traditional employment for self-employment: 51% of the US market is expected to be freelance by 2027. Women in particular are leaving the job market in droves. I’m not convinced, however, that’s because we all believe working for ourselves is the better option: plenty of us had the choice made for us. Plenty others see it as the lesser of two evils, a way of disentangling ourselves from crumbling infrastructure while still making some sort of living.

I want to be clear that this isn’t an essay about solving disillusionment with entrepreneurship. I don’t think that works, and I don’t think it’s available to most people anyway.

Reframing illusions

The disillusionment discourse tends to go one of two ways. Many frame it as a wellness problem, and what you need is rest, boundaries, a digital detox, a better relationship with your phone. Or it’s a civic problem, and what you are is apathetic, checked out, part of the reason why nothing’s getting done and no one is working. In either version, it’s a personal problem that needs personal development work to be solved.

I see disillusionment as a result of the pain of living in liminal times. The feeling that comes after knowing that the old world, the old systems, were never going to hold. That’s not going to be solved with rest, and it’s certainly not going to be solved by checking back in to something that’s near the end of its role in the paradigm.

If we think of it that way, disillusionment isn’t a bad mindset you’re stuck in. It’s an accurate reading of the times. The word says as much: to be disillusioned is to have had an illusion taken away from you. The illusion was the wrong part. That means that if your alarm bells have been going off lately, that means you’re paying attention (I’m tempted to make a joke about being ‘woke’ here, but I’ll resist). You’re sensitive to the things that haven’t yet fully come into being, and you’re emotionally invested enough to feel whatever combination of rage/despair/panic you’re feeling as a result. But I would argue that this ability is a superpower, not an ailment that needs healing.

On exit fantasies

The fullest expression of disillusionment is the exit fantasy: cancelling the lease, quitting the job, and leaving for somewhere calmer, safer, more free. I’ve talked about this before: everyone in my circle has some version of the “buying a plot of land and starting a friend commune” fantasy that they keep returning to.

For some, it’s basically just buying a small house outside of Burlington, Vermont. For others, it might be somewhere completely remote and off-grid. For yet another group of people, that off-grid home will be tricked out with a bunker lined with rifles and MREs, ready to ride out the apocalypse or the next Civil War, whichever comes first. Which one you gravitate to tends to fall down party lines, but the sentiment comes from the same place. We’re all hurting. And with movements like the left-wing preppers, the overlap is widening. In other words, we’re all basically turning into Ron Swanson. Not just the Libertarians among us.

But withdrawal isn’t universally granted. It’s a privilege, one that’s being heavily capitalized on by the world’s elite, who are building their own massively protected compounds. Even amongst the non-elites, exit fantasy is stratified: the people most damaged by system failure are the least mobile. Which creates a disturbing pattern. When the people who feel the pain and have the means to exit do so, there’s no one left who has both the vision and the ability to do something about it. We’d be like Truman, if he walked through the sky-colored door and locked it behind him.

Not exiting, but prototyping better

I sympathize a lot with the exit fantasies; as I said, I share them. But I’ve also spent a lot of time lately thinking about what’s really behind the fantasy. I don’t fantasize about the massive amount of work that it would take to build up a new community from scratch, nor the isolation from the rest of “normal” society that it would facilitate. I do fantasize about real, accessible community, mutual aid, and the rewarding feeling of becoming extremely, tangibly, action-oriented in my approach to the future. And doing it on a small scale, where I can actually witness and influence the results.

There’s an important distinction to be made here: the distinction between exiting alone and prototyping something better, for the sake of everyone. Going off into the woods to do your own thing and reaping the rewards for yourself, against modeling more future-forward, resilient ways of living somewhere other people can actually see them. A withdrawal is built to hold a small number of people. A prototype is built to be legible to people who weren’t there. Same plot of land, different orientation. Leaving the gate unlocked, the code open-sourced. And it applies to our work, our homes, our relationships, all of it. My version, for now, is this: building my practice and sharing my ideas even when they’re not fully formed. Yours will likely be something quite different.

It’s also why I don’t think everyone should leave. We need people who stay inside large institutions and try to turn them, and I’d argue that’s prototyping too, in its harder and much less romantic form. What I don’t want is for all of us who can see what’s happening to end up somewhere else, separately, quite pleased with ourselves for having got out.

Let’s work on it.

This is how I’m trying to reframe my thinking now. Reframing away from “f-ck you all, I’m just going to go work for myself” and towards a prototype of what mobilizing, affirming work could look like. I don’t yet know what the collective form of that looks like, but it’s on my list to figure out. Is it a Liminal Space First Aid Brigade? A co-op, a collective, a group chat, a book club? Maybe it’s some of that, or maybe it’s all of that. What I know, especially after working through these thoughts, is that it can’t be alone. I’d rather work on it in public, get it wrong, iterate, and try again. Whatever it turns out to be, I’d rather build it where you can see it than take my disillusionment somewhere quiet and keep it to myself.

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So, anyone up for starting that Liminal Space First Aid Brigade? I think I’ve had worse ideas.

Until next time,

I’ve had some version of this article in my head since last year, after seeing Weapons in the cinema. It’s evolved a lot from what I originally thought it would be, which was basically some version of “is culture getting even more absurd lately?”. I hope you enjoy and see it as an invitation to, like one of my favorite drag queens Yvie Oddly says,
“let your freak flag fly!”

Pimped Out Marmots

Ever since the story dropped, I can’t stop thinking about OnlyMarms.
In case you haven’t heard: this summer, a biological research team lost their funding for their 60+ year-long study of marmot populations (thanks, as always, to the Cheeto in Charge). Rather than close the program or go the traditional fundraising route, they decided to open an OnlyFans account. Don’t worry, the marmots get to keep their clothes on.

They got the idea from a recent novel-turned-series, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” (it’s worth a watch, by the way. Nick Offerman and Michelle Pfeiffer are incredible). It’s made a decent chunk of money, about $4500, which probably isn’t enough money on its own to save the program. But it’s generated a lot more than cash: attention and affection, arguably two of the most valuable levers in today’s algo-economy. They got coverage in the New York Times and NPR, a partnership with a brewery for a marmot beer, a memecoin (marmcoin?), and the currently ongoing Fat Marmot Week. As a longtime fan of Fat Bear Week, I’m sold.

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It’s not about escaping anymore

Absurd is probably one of the best words I can think of to talk about the current zeitgeist. Last summer was a big moment for horror-comedy with movies like Weapons and Bugonia, and this fall we’re being blessed with Wicker, a tale of a wicker husband who puts all the fleshy ones to shame. Every week, I’m seeing headlines that make me feel like I’m in an episode of Parks and Recreation. You can’t tell me that Natalie Harp jumping into the trunk of a Secret Service SUV isn’t something a dark version of Leslie Knope would do. Satirical platforms like the Onion and Cards Against Humanity are making ridiculous-sounding moves (mainly trolling Alex Jones and Elon Musk, respectively) that have actual, real-world outcomes.

Silly isn’t new, but I feel like for a long time in mainstream culture, its job was mainly escapist. A break from reality to spend some time a world where sharks and tornadoes could join forces. But it doesn’t feel like a break anymore. It feels like the native language reality is being conducted in. The weird used to visit, and now it’s set up shop. And if that’s the case, I think it’s time to start talking about how we move from “lol, this is all fucked” to “this is so dumb it could really do something”. Luckily, we have some history to build off of

Tactical Frivolity and Dilemma Action

You might’ve heard of a term called tactical frivolity. It’s the tradition of using ridiculousness against power: protesters in frog costumes, clowns at the barricades, those trump-as-a-giant-baby balloons. It’s used to keep situations from escalating and to resist without violence, primarily by calling attention to the ridiculousness of having to protest in the first place.

Srdja Popović was one of the leaders of Otpor!, the Serbian youth movement that helped bring down Slobodan Milošević in 2000. He now runs an organization called CANVAS that trains activists all over the world, and he co-wrote a book called Pranksters vs. Autocrats. The concept at the center of it is the dilemma action.

A dilemma action is more than just making people look silly. It’s about forcing the powers-that-be into action, and giving them two bad options. Cracking down makes them look brutal and/or ridiculous, doing nothing makes them look weak. In one Russian protest, people staged a demonstration using tiny toy figurines instead of human bodies, and the government was left to decide whether to formally ban “toy protests”. Popović’s claim is that humorous dilemma actions (also called laughtivism) can actually be more effective than straight nonviolent resistance.

Dilemma action is built around having an opponent, a regime to embarrass, a structural pillar to crumble. And that’s brilliant. But my question is: what could happen if we channeled absurdity not at an enemy, but at an audience, pointing it towards what we want to build instead of what we want to dismantle or resist?

Lessons from the Shoe-Thrower

Way back in 2008, at the tail end of his presidency, Bush narrowly dodged two shoes thrown at his head at a press conference in Iraq. It was as viral of an event as was possible at the time, the “shoe heard around the world”. It got a ton of mileage as late-night monologue material, and the primary reaction among the public was basically “lol, Bush is good at dodgeball.“

I recently listened to a long interview by RadioLab with the man himself, Muntadhar al-Zaidi. It’s an incredible piece of journalism. Al-Zaidi himself is a journalist. He had been reporting on the war for years, covering the unspeakable horrors committed by US troops that he witnessed. He kept documenting, and no one listened. In his words, “the Americans did not even get my stories.” All he wanted was for people to listen. The shoe came out of that unbearable gap between everything he had witnessed and the total silence that met it.

He chose a shoe for a reason: getting hit with a shoe only humiliates, it isn’t violent enough to martyr the victim. In Arab culture, he explains, the highest gift you can give is roses, so he wanted the exact opposite of roses — the thing you wear on your feet. It wasn’t a whimsical choice, it was a choice made in rage. Sometimes the absurd choice is the most disciplined thing a furious person can do.

The problem is, the world asked about the shoe. It didn’t ask what made him angry enough to throw it. For most of the world, the image of him just got paused on him throwing the shoe. Absurdity is so good at cracking something open, and so often that’s where it stops.

From break to build

Here’s another example: “Orange Alternative”, an anti-communist movement that emerged in Poland in the 1980’s. During peak martial law, protests were being crushed and their messages spray-painted over, leaving cities quiet and marked with blank censorship spots. Waldemar Fydrych had the idea one day to paint a little dwarf inside one of those spots. A stick figure with a tiny pointed hat. Suddenly there were dwarves, by the hundreds, all over Poland, painted inside the very smears the regime had used to erase dissent. Enforcers were left with a choice: cover up silly drawings, knowing what they mean, or let them stay? The dwarves broke through an otherwise bleak time and gave people a little “hero” to rally around.

And then Fydrych’s group took the dwarves off the walls and into the streets. They staged “happenings”: mass absurdist gatherings, people in orange dwarf hats, thousands of them eventually, chanting “dwarves, dwarves, dwarves.” They prioritized acts of care, handing out things that were actually scarce under communism, like toilet paper and tampons. And the police made plenty of arrests, but you can’t look tough arresting a man in a pointed hat for handing out toilet paper.

By 1988 the happenings had spread across the country. In 1989, Poland held elections, Solidarity won, communism fell, and it set off the domino run that took down the entire Soviet bloc. Nobody serious claims the dwarves caused that alone. But there’s a strong case that they mattered. They made an unbearable situation survivable, kept spirits alive, drained the fear out of the room, and pointed everyone toward a yes that eventually arrived. It was absurdity aimed not just at humiliating an enemy but at holding people together long enough to get somewhere

.

So how do we construct the ‘right’ kind of weird?

Back to my original question: is there a way that we can capture the power of absurdity and direct it specifically towards building the world we want?

The short answer: study comedy and storytelling. The long answer:

Find the friction. Absurdity only reads as absurd in contrast. The shoe landed because press-conference decorum is so formal. OnlyMarms landed because science funding is so respectable. Find the part of the equation that seems fixed and find a way to call that into question – this is what good foresight is, really.

Point to better outcomes. Before you do the absurd thing, get clear on what you want on the other side of it. Otherwise you make a great meme and go right back to feeling stuck afterward.

Lower the stakes. This is the “just do it for the lols” advice that’s everywhere right now, except pointed inward, at your own paralysis rather than at an audience. If the thing has to be effective to be worth doing, you will never do it. The bar is too high. The permission absurdity offers is that it’s allowed to fail.

Know the system. Know your enemy. Design the dilemma action so that any response moves you forward. I think sincerity is important here: everybody can smell a try-hard when it comes to being weird, and “hacking the growth” won’t land.

Personally, I find it helpful to see absurdity not as weapon or a strategy, but as permission. Bat shit times call for bat shit measures. It won’t necessarily change the system. But it might get you unstuck enough to move, and movement is the thing I think so many of us are longing for.

Writing this text has inspired me to think a little more about how I can channel my rage into something absurd that just might do something. Anyone want to join me?

Until next time,

This week we’re talking about a topic that’s very close to home for me: what the hell we’re supposed to do about the heat. I’m just thanking my lucky stars that it’s actually gotten cooler this week, which has allowed to pull my brain out of survival mode and think thoughts other than it’s too hot in here. My thoughts are with you wherever you are, especially if like me, you rode out this latest wave in an attic apartment. It’s rough, y’all.

Am I a… Climate Migrant?

I’ve spent a lot of time these last weeks thinking about heat. Like a lot of you, I’m sure. I’ve strongly maintained my bragging rights over heat for years since I moved to Germany. Whenever summer would hit and people would complain, I’d butt in with something like “THIS? This is nothing. Where I come from, it’s HOT.” Annoying, I know. Literally speaking, I was correct. I’m from the Central Valley of California, where temperatures regularly top 100ºF (~38ºC) in the summer months, on the really bad days inching closer to 110º (~43ºC). It’s a dry heat, the kind that feels akin to the blast of hot air that emanates from an opened oven door. The kind that burns your legs if you’re unlucky enough to be a shorts-wearer climbing into a car with vinyl seats, and makes you wary of touching anything else inside that happens to be made of metal. I was a tennis player in high school, and one of my teammates once had a tennis racket that was left in the back of her car melt. It’s hot.

It’s also been, for the past decade or so, smokey. I lived in the Sacramento area during some of the worst fire seasons of recent memory. There were days when going outside was the carcinogenic equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes in 15 minutes. Two weeks was enough to turn the air filters in our HVAC systems black. On my first date with my husband back in Munich, I had just gotten back from a home visit and I couldn’t stop coughing. I offered a very 2020 statement as explanation: “I don’t have COVID, it’s just wildfire smoke in my lungs”. There are many reasons why I moved to Germany, but one was that I felt like I had to flee a landscape that was starting to feel less like California and more like Mars.

For my first few years in Munich the summers were different, but comparatively pleasant. Muggy and often rainy, which was a new phenomenon for me, but almost never more than 90ºF (~33ºC). I’ve said often that despite coming from such a hot place, I’ve never sweat as much as I have in Munich. The heat here doesn’t radiate, it envelops. While California heat feels like it reaches up to you from beneath your feet, Munich heat permeates the very particles around you. But it always felt relatively escapable. We had the Alps, and the Isar, and fans for the days when things got bad.

Because it’s always been a choice and not a need, Germans (generally speaking) are especially allergic to the concept of air conditioning: only 10-15% of German households have one, compared to roughly half in Italy. I mean this literally: I’ve had many a German swear to me that it makes them sick. I can remember a work trip to Chicago with my colleagues in June, all of them equipped with scarves to protect their necks from the offensive assault of cold air.

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Cranking up the Thermostat

Now, things are different. Western Europe just had its hottest June and July on record. Germany broke its all-time temperature record twice in one week. There were a number of days when I was shocked to see that it was hotter in Munich than it was in Sacramento. Normally almost jungle-like in the summer, the grass in my neighborhood has toasted. Unprecedented fires raged in France and Spain, and the smoke blanketed a huge stretch of Western Europe. Suddenly, those air quality issues I thought I’d escaped showed up at my new front door.

So despite their aversion, Germans flooded Amazon and the local big box stores and bought up every single AC unit available. The plug-and-play versions of those are bulbous, heavy, cumbersome machines that require you to tarp off your window and stick a tube out of them to exhaust the hot air. My local Lotto made a decision that could only be made in a low-crime city: without windows that could open, they quite literally punched a hole through their plexiglass window for the exhaust tube and duct taped it in place.

These ACs are expensive, they use a pretty significant amount of electricity, and they’re really only strong enough to cool one room. But they’re suddenly an essential stopgap, one of the only emergency measures that for some might be the difference between life and death. During June’s heat wave in Europe, 16,000 more people than usual died, disproportionally the more vulnerable of us: the elderly, the poor, and workers without the choice of stopping when it’s hot. And the privileged of us who aren’t yet dealing with existential risk are starting to ask questions: if this place becomes unbearable, where do we go? How do we make plans when the ground around us might literally burn up, sink, wash away?

A lot of the inspiration for this essay came from this piece from the Semiotic Sisterhood: “Brands Sell Sunshine, but Europe is Melting”.

Semiotic Sisterhood

Brands Sell Sunshine, but Europe Is Melting

“My favorite feeling: summer,” reads the ad. Around it, people are sweating through their shirts, fanning themselves with whatever’s at hand, rushing to the next air-conditioned refuge. The billboard and the street no longer agree on what season this is…

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3 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Hannah Hoel

They talked about how the narrative of Euro summer: relaxed Aperol spritzes on a beach in France, luxurious strolls through Italian city markets, are giving way to a new narrative. A narrative of protection, survival, and resilience against an environment that inflicts feelings of inflammation and fever on its inhabitants. My question is: how do we place ourselves within these new narratives? How do we find our way, make a plan, avoid melting into the couch in despair, in a situation that is largely being driven by big systemic forces that we can’t control? For me, this feels like an especially personal question. My leaving California was supposed to buy me an escape from fire, and it took less than a decade for it to reach my new doorstep.

Grabbing the Iron

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay titled “How to deal with feeling responsible for the world”. I wanted to build a framework to help us tackle these wicked problems in a way that gives us something that feels actionable without taking on more than we’re supposed to be responsible for or contributing to extractive systems, and keeps a finger pointed back at the larger sources of power that also need to do their parts. This burning question feels like a great moment to put that framework to the test.

What I Can Do

The easiest answer for the near-term (for those who can afford it) is to shop, and the market is rapidly swelling with products that can offer us relief. Not just ACs: mini swimming pools and cold plunges, personal coolers like the viral Shark ChillPill, ventilated jackets, ice rollers, cooling sheets. But the classic problems with this persist: we’re helping others capitalize on our emergency, and we’re contributing to more energy use and waste in the process. Of course, there are other non-consumptive jobs-to-be-done like learning passive cooling techniques and designing your schedules around peak temperatures. I’ll be honest though: there’ve been days where anyone telling me to roll down my shutters instead of running my AC would’ve gotten verbally punched in the throat.

In the long-term, the obvious thing is that I can move somewhere more resistant to heat and fire. Except I already did that. I don’t say that to discount relocation, but to say that this requires really deeply understanding where the risks might be in the future, and which risks you’re willing to take on. I can also build my home with both passive and active cooling in mind. And, maybe most impactfully, I can start to contribute more tangibly: designing solutions, putting forth ideas, and building systems that actually move the needle.

What We Can Do

Right now, collective action will look like community formation around the immediate and dire. Checking in on elderly neighbors and putting out water and shade spots for the neighborhood creatures are the smallest scale version of that, and collective organization is the larger: coming up with mutual aid and community events that activate collective care now.

In the long-term, we need to be informed, and we need to demand our politicians to be equally informed and act accordingly. That means mass literacy in all things climate, like renewable energy and heating and cooling solutions. In Germany, for example, we still have a lot of things standing in the way of large-scale implementation of solar panels, and the Wärmepumpe debate has been so thoroughly worked over by lobbying and misinformation that a heat pump has become an intensely divisive party-line topic. This is one of the big glaring warning signs in action: when staying cool becomes an identity debate, it becomes way harder to legislate our way through.

This is why seeing the long game matters. Enacting building standards that require a flat to be survivable at 40ºC are completely outside my reach as one person acting alone, now. At a five year horizon they’re something a sufficiently loud group of residents can actually accomplish.

We can’t depend on politics going our way (I think we all know that), but we can vote, organize, and be loud about what we need.

What We Can Let Go

It’s painful, but I think part of this process will be allowing for grief for the world that we’ll never get back. There’s truth in the tongue-in-cheek remarks that volley the “this was the hottest summer so far” comments back with “you mean the coolest summer from now on?”. It’s really freaking sad. It’s sad to drive through the Sierras and see acres and acres of pine turned to matchsticks. And with that grief comes acceptance: knowing that the world we’re experiencing now is the result of decades of decisions, most of them not ours, and we can’t turn back the clock. We can be angry. We should be angry. But if we want to maintain our sanity and keep the steam from constantly pouring out our ears, we have to accept the reality that there are a lot of powerful players in the world that actively want to keep our feet in the fire, and we can’t make all of them go away. But we can stay looking forward, seeing the tracks that we haven’t started down yet, and look for ways to throw the switch while we still can.

As you can tell, this is still something I’m very much grappling with. But I hope by chewing on this out loud, I can reach anyone else who might feel like the thermostat has been snatched away from them. We do still have power, as long as we know where to direct it.

Until next time,

Enjoy, wherever in the world you are.

My Beef with Goodreads

I’ve been an avid Goodreads user for years. As of today I have nearly 400 books logged and 53 on my reading wishlist. I’m also incredibly competitive (mostly in competition with myself), which is how I ended up an obsessive participant in their Annual Reading Challenge. You set a number of books as your yearly goal and the app tracks your progress along the way. Naturally, part of the fun is also in seeing how your friends are progressing and feeling a certain scholarly smugness when you’re further along in your challenge than they are.

Last year was a crazy year, largely taken over by the fact that I was planning not one but two wedding celebrations. After the confetti settled in November, I stumbled across my mostly-forgotten Goodreads Challenge and was aghast. I had set what I thought was an achievable goal of 50 books, but was only at a measly 35. Rather than just taking the L and acknowledging that I had more important things to do that year, I made it my mission to inhale those 15 books by New Year’s.

So I listened to audiobooks at my desk. I forced my way through a couple short novellas that I really didn’t like (including one that gave me actual nightmares) because book count was the important metric, not page count. I stopped listening to podcasts and reading articles. And guess how many I hit in the end? 45. And guess how many people (myself not included) expressed their disappointment in me for not succeeding? Literally no one. Obviously.

What escaped me at the time is what reaching that goal actually meant. Choosing book count over page count meant everything I read got shorter and slighter. Choosing books over everything else meant no podcasts, no essays, nothing that couldn’t be logged. The number went up and everything around it shrank.

I originally wanted to turn this article into a story of how Goodreads (another Bezos company, BTW) is just another example of tech companies selling us self-improvement and optimization to keep us feeding the ever-hungry data machine. Log your books, track your steps, quantify your sleep. But while I think that’s true, what’s more interesting and (I hope) helpful is to ask: what could we add to our lives if we measured our media consumption not in terms of quantity, but in terms of richness and variety?

Our Appetites for Variety

At some point when I wasn’t in the middle of a mad book sprint, I listened to an episody of Liz Moody’s podcast with Dr. Megan Rossi, a researcher and dietician focused on gut health. Rather than recommending people eat a certain amount of greens per week or to count their protein intake or any of the usual advice, hers was simple and refreshing: try to eat as many different types of plants as you can every week. Our gut microbiomes, she argued, love diversity. And our brains hate restriction, which is why advice centered on not eating certain bad-for-you things is so hard to follow.

I don’t know nearly enough about the gut-brain connection, but I do know that our brains also love variety. We light up when we experience those things that feel novel, the things that pull us out of our day-to-day. And I’d argue that it doesn’t just feel good, it’s useful: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an “aha” moment in my work that comes from some random thing I tried or watched.

But here’s where I think the bones of this argument really lie: in order to be active agents of our own futures, to be slashers of misinformation and bursters of bubbles and fighters for the better, we need to be great thinkers. And maybe it’s in part the lifelong bookworm in me talking, but I think a big part of what makes a great thinker is an openness to taking in knowledge from every available source and a practiced ability to absorb it and reflect on it.

I haven’t been very intentional about that over the years, and I want to get better. If you’re in the same boat, welcome! Let’s do it together.

Growing the Menu

Adding variety to your media diet can look like a number of different things. Here are just a few:

Type

I’m a book person, clearly. But there is so much to be found in other forms of media. There’s film, long-form videos, podcasts, articles, poems, plays. Something I like to do is introduce different formats for different moments. I just bought a Mary Oliver poetry anthology, “Devotions”, and have been really enjoying reading one or two when I first get up in the morning.

Genre

We often fall back on the idea that nonfiction is the only way to learn, and anything other than fact-based books and documentaries isn’t a good use of brainpower. I don’t think that’s true. Contemporary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, mystery, and all of the other niche genres out there are full of little hints of life and learning that might surprise you.

Creator

Take a quick scan of all of the typical media you consume and look for patterns in their creators: are they all American? White? Female or Male? An easy way to get more variety is to try to break that pattern and look for voices that haven’t been represented so far in your library. A while back I started a spreadsheet to track a fun goal: reading a book by an author from every country. When I feel like I’m in a rut, I have a look at that spreadsheet and track down a book from a country that I haven’t heard any stories from yet.

This needs a lot of nuance, but I also think there is a time and a place for engaging with creators who have very different value systems than our own. The more uncomfortable it makes you, the more you might learn. I’m strongly opposed to basically everything that Joe Rogan is about, but if I’m only repeating the talking points of other people without engaging critically with his content firsthand, I can’t actually talk about it effectively. We might have to get a bit clever here, because it is absolutely true that attention and views and clicks are money, but I think there are ways around that. For example: if you’re an online person of the Millennial/Gen Z era, you probably remember the Ned Fulmer scandal a few years ago. When he tried to make a comeback and released a podcast, a number of creators basically “took one for the team” and put up their own recordings of the podcast that viewers could watch instead of the original so that Ned’s numbers wouldn’t inflate.

Prestige

This might be especially true for people like me with a cultural studies background, but I think there’s so much fun to be had and culture to be experienced in remaining open-minded to all levels of so-called “prestige” in media. You will never hear me bad-talking “trashy” reality TV or beach reads. Obviously we shouldn’t be condoning anything that’s exploitative, which can be the case with reality TV, but you can’t tell me that any of the Real Housewives shows aren’t an absolutely fascinating window into a life the vast majority of us won’t experience.

Platform

I’ve also been looking at where my content comes from and what’s behind it as another source of variety. My husband and I felt stuck in a Netflix rut recently, so we paused and tried out Mubi, which is more geared towards arthouse films. We also love a lot of BBC productions and have been toying with testing out BritBox. If you’re a YouTube person, consider checking out independent video creators who have their own hosting and direct payment system, like Dropout TV. I’ve also been seeking out independent print magazines or zines in favor of the usual sources of articles like the New York Times. I think this is also a fantastic way to divest from the increasingly Big Tech-backed mainstream media (pardon my use of an often-used Trump talking point), and be a bit more intentional with how you’re voting with your wallet.

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Finding Satisfaction & Satiety

So if we’re not quantifying our reading in an app as a measure of how “well” we’re doing, what does success look like? I think that’s really an individual question, but I’ll answer it for myself and maybe it’ll spark something in you:

• Tracking quotes, not finished works: I’d like to be more intentional about marking up and writing down quotes, ideas, and thoughts that stick with me from anything I’m consuming. One of my goals for the coming months is to create a dedicated media journal and test out what level of commitment makes sense for me, but I like the idea of all of my collections and thoughts living in one place and not scattered across my notes app, Goodreads, Letterboxd, etc.

• Cross-connections and pattern recognition: Possibly in that same media journal, I’d like to make more space to think about aha moments, patterns, and cross-connections between all of the things I’m consuming. I think that’s when being a more conscious consumer really gets fun: when you can find a parallel between an academic paper and a trashy thriller.

• Consumption in community: We’re social creatures, and I think part of the reason why platforms like Letterboxd feel so rewarding is they give us the feeling that we’re consuming in community with other people. I’d like to explore other, smaller ways of doing that that feel more fulfilling, like joining a book club or creating a chat with friends specifically for talking about and recommending works. It’s such a dopamine hit when you recommend something to someone and they go watch/read/listen to it and then come back to talk about it with you!

I’ll be honest: I still set a Goodreads goal for this year. I couldn’t help myself. But I’ve decided not to add star ratings to my log this year, and I’ve been reminding myself that the goal really isn’t that important. At the end of this year, I’ll feel like I’ve won if I’ve made a real attempt at getting that media journal going and have had a few unexpected insights that come out of that push for variety.

I think most of us are hyper-aware at this point that the systems of today largely function by treating us as consumers to be targeted. And there’s a lot of advice out there currently that’s aimed at helping us to create more than we consume, to become more active participants in the world. Here’s what I’ll leave you with: if we really do want to become better creators, we need a good baseline. We need to see the world from 10 different sides, styles, and perspectives, and we need to be able to talk about what we see. I hope, for myself and for you, that diversifying our media diet will be a generative step in getting us there.

All the best,
Kinsey

I hope you’re all staying cool during this terribly hot start to August. I’ve been back home with my family and using every available opportunity to swim in cold water. In the interest of staying cool and having a little downtime, this week’s article is a reissue. The good news is, this is one of the first pieces I’ve ever written and 95% of you haven’t seen it. It’s one of my favorites. Enjoy.

how many materials can you identify by touch alone?

Hands in Clay

After years of fascination from afar, last year I finally committed and signed up for a pottery course at a local studio. And while I knew it was a skill that would take time and practice to hone, it was even harder than I expected. Many of my first pots failed – collapsed, cracked, or patchily glazed, and the early successful pieces are something I’m not sure that even I, their mother, can love. Despite that, I’ve become obsessively committed to the craft.

The act of making pottery is an intensely bodily experience. No amount of reading, watching, or memorizing will grant you the ability to summon a form out of a lump of rapidly spinning clay. Your elbows must be firmly planted into your sides, your hands together and steady, your motions fast (but not too fast), and the clay wet (but not too wet). The only way to learn is by getting to know the clay and trying, feeling, and failing, over and over again.

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I’m a knowledge worker. My success at my job relies on my ability to engage with content, think, and apply it to serve the goals of our projects and clients. It’s a classically cerebral job – the more knowledge I can absorb and retain, the more successful I am. I love my work, but pottery has become an absolute pillar of my mental health over the last few months. I’m sure this is in no small part due to the fact that I’m not just going home and doomscrolling every day (you can’t exactly doomscroll when you’re up to your elbows in clay mud), but I think the key reason is that developing this skill has scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had. Through the practice of pottery, I’m deeply learning the ins and outs of a material in all its intricacies. Each type of clay body has its own demands and behaves differently. My hands have to do the learning, beyond what my brain can articulate. I’m thinking with and through the clay, not just about it.

An Introduction to Material Literacy

I recently stumbled across a TikTok by textile historian @erenanaomi that talked about fabric scraps left by 18th century mothers at the Foundling Hospital in London. These women, forced to give up their children, would leave a piece of fabric pinned to the child’s clothing to identify them in case they’d ever be able to come back for them. The nurses at the hospital catalogued each scrap, and just by looking and touching each material, they could ID its weave and fiber content with incredible accuracy.

Elena called it “material literacy”: the ability to read materials, to understand their properties and possibilities through direct engagement. It’s a form of embodied knowledge that lives in your hands and senses rather than just your head. We as a society have lost our literacy in most materials and constructions, from fabric to clay to mechanics. And this loss has massive implications for how we navigate the world as both workers and consumers.

When I saw this, it immediately connected with my own experiences as a new potter. I’m gaining literacy, and somehow gaining more of myself in the process. When I started exploring this further, I found a framework called material-engagement theory by Lambros Malafouris that argues thinking and forming are inseparable. Thinking isn’t just something happening inside our heads, but people and the things they use are part of the same process of thinking and acting, and by extension, objects can actually affect how we think and what we do. By interacting with materials, we create new meanings and ideas. The things help bring those ideas into being, and we as humans evolve in the process of making.

What We’ve Lost

Over the last half-century, we’ve seen a sharp drop in craft-centered learning in favor of the academically-centered. Matthew Crawford writes in “Shop Class as Soulcraft” that it was in the 1990s when shop class started to disappear from schools, replaced by a push to prepare students for knowledge work. At the time, it was a simple economic choice, following shifting attitudes about what constituted an aspirational career: more computers, less carpentry. From the beginning, there’s been a problematic implied hierarchy between the two disciplines, with one being touted as the more “intellectual” choice. But as Crawford points out, labor-oriented jobs can be just as, if not more intellectually engaging than jobs officially recognized as knowledge work.

Beyond shop class, we see this in the information we get as consumers when it comes to understanding and repairing our devices. Older catalogues used to include blown-up parts diagrams and schematics for appliances. It was assumed that consumers would want this information, that we’d be capable of understanding it. At some point, planned obsolescence took over, our devices got more complicated and more opaque, and those diagrams disappeared. Alongside our increasing material illiteracy came an expectation from the companies supplying our world with stuff that we should replace instead of repair.

It feels like we as a society are only beginning to understand the long-term consequences of this mindset. We’re increasingly disconnected from our jobs (currently, 79% percent of us are, according to Gallup) and Crawford argues that it stems from the desire to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. When we can’t understand how things are made or how they work, when we’re not called upon to exercise manual competence, the world becomes something that happens to us rather than something we participate in.

Then Came the Algorithms

If knowledge work already had a problem with intelligibility, AI seems to be intensifying it. A recent systematic literature review draws on Marx’s theory of alienation to understand what’s happening in AI-mediated workplaces. Marx described alienation as workers becoming estranged from what they produce, from the labor process itself, and from their own human potential (if you want a quick primer on Marxist thought, please enjoy this one with puppets).

From this perspective, AI risks intensifying exploitative capitalist dynamics that were already present. Instead of creating meaningful work, we become supervisors of AI-created work. Algorithmic management embeds control within systems that are often opaque to the workers they govern. Data-driven surveillance tracks and measures work in increasingly granular ways. Of course, this isn’t universally the case. In creative industries, there are lots of examples of incredible AI-enabled creative works bubbling up. But for the average worker, the former feels more likely.

What strikes me about this research isn’t just the mechanisms it describes, but the language it uses: loss of autonomy, diminished control, erosion of agency. These are the same feelings Crawford was identifying in knowledge work before AI became ubiquitous. The algorithms are making visible something that was already broken.

There are way too many factors at play to be able to predict which path we’re going to follow as we move into the AI future. Some argue AI will bring post-scarcity futures or the end of work entirely, while others believe it will only further entrench historical patterns of exploitation. What seems clear is that right now, in this moment, AI is being implemented in ways that make many of us feel less capable, less competent, less powerful than we did before. And if we feel alienated in both our lives as workers and as consumers, with no area where we have real agency, we have a problem.

Material Literacy as Resistance

I’ve been thinking about what this means, practically speaking, for how we live and work.

Crawford frames this as a struggle for individual agency, and material competence becomes a form of power, however small. When you can make or repair something, the power dynamic shifts slightly. You’re less dependent, less purely a consumer. You have knowledge that exists in your hands, not just in your head – knowledge that can’t be easily automated or algorithmically managed. Materials have their own logic that you learn through engagement, not observation. Clay has properties, behaviors, limits. Learning to work with it isn’t about imposing your will on inert matter. It’s about developing a kind of conversation.

As consumers, understanding materials changes what and how we buy. You notice quality differently when you know what you’re looking at. You think about repair rather than replacement. Crawford writes that we want to feel our world is intelligible so we can be responsible for it. Material literacy is one way back toward intelligibility.

Moving Forward

If you haven’t already, you’re going to hear a lot about “going analog” as a trend for 2026. A lot of the interpretations of this tend more towards 90’s and 00’s nostalgia than actual analog (think old point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones). But I think where the interesting interpretation of “analog” lies is in the activities that encourage materiality.

If there’s a material or craft you’ve been drawn to, consider this your invitation to dive deep. Don’t just follow tutorials. If you’re learning to knit, learn what the different fibers are, where they come from, how they feel in your hands. Understand why merino behaves differently than alpaca, why some yarns pill and others don’t. If you don’t know where to start, there’s a whole world of endangered crafts that need people to learn them, like letterpress printing, bookbinding, basket weaving, or hand tool carpentry. If these crafts disappear, we lose entire vocabularies for understanding materials.

I’m not suggesting everyone should quit their jobs and become craftspeople. That’s neither practical nor desirable. But I do think that cultivating material literacy somewhere in your life changes your relationship to the world. In a system designed around our dependence and passivity, material literacy feels like a productive form of protest. When knowledge work is increasingly mediated by algorithms, when AI makes decisions we can’t interrogate, when the world becomes less intelligible rather than more, working with our hands insists on a different kind of intelligence. It’s an intelligence that exists in our bodies, in the conversation between hand and material, in knowledge that can’t be reduced to data.

I’m also not romanticizing a return to some pre-industrial past. But I am suggesting that maintaining the capacity to understand, make, and repair things is maintaining a capacity the current system benefits from us losing. What material literacy offers is a way of being in the world that feels more whole, more capable, more awake. In a time when so much seems designed to make us feel powerless, that feels worth paying attention to.

Sources

https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-need-for-material-literacy?srsltid=AfmBOopwWOa2Kw8EcfIIvjiFdkWm2VkrK1sNynvoX2W2mfQoPDCQv5ac

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721419873349

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398679292_Automation_Alienation_and_Artificial_Intelligence_A_Marxist_Analysis_of_the_Modern_Workplace_-_A_Systematic_Literature_Review_PRISMA_2020

https://books.google.de/books/about/Shop_Class_as_Soulcraft.html?id=LdfEDAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

Last week I promised you I’d tell you about my trip to the world’s first AI art museum, and I asked you not to cancel me for going. So here it is, in all its relatively long glory, But this is a topic that needs a fair amount of space and nuance to do it justice, so forgive me a bit of long-windedness.

First, let’s talk about why I went. My central goal for my time in LA was to practice turning my future goggles on: where in LA can I find signals that point to broader narratives of how the world is changing. I wrote a more in-depth post on that here:

Obviously, the generative AI subject is pervasive right now, especially in Hollywood. It’s everywhere, and everyone has an opinion. Los Angeles is a city that’s been a global hub for culture, entertainment, and spectacle for a century, and what comes out of it has a huge influence on what happens on the entire global stage. So when something like the “world’s first AI art museum” pops up, its reception matters on a scale that’s much bigger than just their own city borders.

I also think that it’s important for us to be able to articulate our own opinions about things like AI that go beyond “It’s bad and I don’t like it”, and one of the best ways to do that is to learn and experience firsthand. So with that in mind, I swallowed my revulsion at paying $50 on a Wednesday morning for a museum I was pretty sure I wouldn’t really like and went in. For the research.

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AI + Nature = Good?

The inaugural exhibition features the work of Refik Anadol Studios, and it’s called Machine Dreams: Rainforest. The subject is mainly the Amazon: its biodiversity, and its loss. Recurring themes are ecological memory, extinction, and Indigenous knowledge, the last of these through a collaboration with the Yawanawá community of Acre, Brazil, who named one of the central works and whose songs are part of the soundscape.

It’s built on the Large Nature Model (LNM), which Anadol’s team trained on data about the natural world rather than on human language and images. The studio’s position is that conventional AI models can only return human knowledge back to us, while theirs is trained on what they call nature’s inherent intelligence.

Anadol wants AI understood as a collaborator rather than an opponent. He describes the museum as alive, and says “the living museum is the art.” Writing on Dataland’s blog, he says the work is meant to help us “reflect on our place in the world, and inspire us to care for it in new and meaningful ways.” It’s a lovely set of intentions, and I walked in genuinely hoping it would work.

The (virtual) Reality of Dataland

Dataland sits in the middle of Downtown LA in a Frank Gehry-designed building. It neighbors The Broad, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to the LA Philharmonic. Spoiler Alert: next time, I think I’ll stick to the classics (it feels somewhat wrong to call the MOCA classic, but here we are).

You start in a room that feels like Star Trek in a theme park sort of way: a dark space, rows of monitors, a soothing voice, and a case that splits open in front of you to reveal a wrist sensor and a scent collar. The wristband tracks your biometrics like heart rate and the amount of activity in your sweat glands. The collar releases a “sequence of molecular scent compositions” developed with L’Oréal. Then you go down an escalator into the Data Pavilion.

Speaking purely from an aesthetic point of view, I did find this room really impressive. The sound design was beautiful and the graphics compelling. It’s not for those susceptible to vertigo, but as far as immersiveness goes, I’ve seen waaaaay worse. I’m looking at you, the company that keeps churning out those Van Gogh/Klimt/Picasso “experiences”.

From there you pass into the Latent Gallery, three interactive stations where you can draw with your finger and watch the line sprout into plants or fish or birds, dance and see your silhouette resolve into weather, or scroll the archive and be impressed by an absurd number of bird pictures. Then two rooms: the Infinity Room, a smaller full-immersion film called The Dream of Ruwe Pinu, and the Sanctuary, home to the thirty-foot amorphous shifting artwork that one critic once called a “glorified lava lamp” and that is, supposedly, influenced by the biometrics of everyone currently in the building.

The Avatar Effect

To put it shortly, my emotional experience of Dataland as a whole was pretty flat. I definitely didn’t leave with the “collective responsibility to act” feeling that was promised, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone. I think my problem is that Dataland feels like the same sort of call to connect with nature as James Cameron’s Avatar movies. At best you sit in the dark, enjoy a pretty spectacle, think “huh, that was cool,” and leave more or less unchanged.

If Dataland were an ordinary technology museum, that would be fine. Spectacle is a legitimate thing for an experiential museum to sell, and plenty of institutions sell it well. But we’re at too critical a moment in the story of generative AI to let this particular version slide. And more importantly, Dataland isn’t presenting itself as spectacle. It’s presenting itself as a moral argument.

Martin Zeilinger and Deniz Johns, academics from the Netherlands, wrote an extended critique of Anadol’s very similar work at the Serpentine in London that I think still nails it. Their starting point comes from the anthropology of art: we tend to experience artworks “as if” they hold some agency of their own, as things that cause events to happen around them, and in doing so they can pass some of that agency on to us. Imagination, in this reading, isn’t passive. They call it “a social phenomenon that is consequential and powerful,” one that “opens up the possibility to create different futures from the status quo.” That’s the good version of what a place like Dataland could be.

But they’re clear that the potential only gets realized if the work builds conditions for critical engagement, and their difficulty with Anadol’s work is that it seems to do the opposite. It “reinforces the mystery of the computational tools it utilizes.” Rather than cracking open the black box, it “fetishizes the polished surfaces of the technology,” presenting AI as supernatural instead of as “a constructed system shaped by human biases, corporate interests, and ideological frameworks... it envelops the viewer in a sensory spectacle that pacifies rather than activates, offering immersion without critical engagement.”

The Nuts and Bolts

Dataland’s LNM is surrounded by statements designed to assure us that it’s not like those other guys’ LLMs, it’s a good version. According to its creators, the LNM is an ethically trained model that uses only openly licensed and consensually gathered data, is as carbon-friendly as possible, and open-source. Let’s unpack that a little bit.

Data provenance. The Large Nature Model was trained on data the studio either collected itself on field expeditions or licensed from institutions like the Smithsonian, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, London’s Natural History Museum, and Getty. Nothing scraped, nothing stolen. You can go further back and ask whether the people who contributed recordings to those archives imagined their work training a generative model, and that’s a real question. But legally and ethically, by the standards of this industry, it’s above board. Given the state of the field, that’s not nothing.

Sustainability. By Dataland’s own reporting, the power required to process a single visitor’s stay is roughly equivalent to one smartphone charge, running on a dedicated Google Cloud cluster in Oregon at 87% carbon-free energy. Great. However, my understanding of AI (not to claim that I’m an expert in the tech) is that the bulk of its footprint comes from the training, not the use afterwards. The studio’s own line on this front is that any heavy electrical footprint is “restricted to the initial training phase”, but I couldn’t find any information more concrete than that.

Open source. Dataland’s website describes the LNM as “the world’s first open source AI model based solely on nature data.” How this manifests in reality seems to be a web version of the Living Encyclopedia, with which you can do things like generate images and ask questions. When I hear open-source, I expect things like freely available training data, code, and weights, and I couldn’t find anything like that on their Github (the contents of which are from 2022) or Hugging Face. Again, not an expert, but a browser app feels like a stretch of the word open-source and not quite in the spirit of agency-building that they claim to want to facilitate.

Participatory, sort of

Almost everything Dataland describes as participatory works the same way: your body produces data, the data enters the system, and the system changes. Your heartbeat shapes the sound in the Pavilion. The “collective emotional temperature” of everyone in the building shapes the painting in the Sanctuary.

The question I kept asking myself as I encountered the space was: how would I know the difference? To be clear, I have no evidence that any of it is fake. But I also have no obvious way of experiencing firsthand that it is real, and neither do you, and neither does anyone else who walks through. And because of that, it doesn’t create that sense of resonance that Anadol is going for. There are almost no direct cause-and-effect moments in the experience, it’s mostly “if you say so.” All of that compute, all of that infrastructure, and the actual epistemic position of the visitor is trust.

Noah J. Nelson at No Proscenium, reviewing the opening, landed somewhere similar: “the overall effect feels less responsive to our presence than it does interpretive of our data.” That’s exactly it. For anyone who’s owned a smartwatch that’s summarized their steps at the end of the day, that doesn’t feel impactful. And that’s barely an exaggeration: one of the “metrics” that Dataland offered me in overview at the end of the experience was a map overview of the space and a line that showed my path as I moved through it. It reminded me of a feature of the Legend of Zelda games (love Zelda, but not a compliment).

When I scanned the rooms and watched my fellow attendees, I saw people doing what they generally always do at every mass-market exhibition: take photographs, play with the interactive screens for a bit, move on. I’m not saying that as a criticism of the visitors, but a critique of the design. If you want critical reflection in a space like that, you have to build sturdy rails for it, or situate the work somewhere that kind of attention comes naturally. Dataland does neither, and I suspect that’s because neither one makes the big money or the big headlines.

The Big Tech in the Back

I think Refik Anadol is genuine in his ideas and his values. The Ruwe Pinu piece was developed with the Yawanawá community of Acre with Chief Nixiwaka’s permission, and in 2023 he built a blockchain project that raised millions for Yawanawá-led cultural infrastructure. The Kaua’i ʻōʻō recording at the heart of that room is a real 1987 tape of the last known male calling for a mate that no longer existed. That is a devastating artefact and he treats it with care. He also runs an artist residency with Google Arts & Culture offering six months, $25,000, and cloud access to emerging digital artists, which is real money going to real people.

But sincerity isn’t the issue. Behind the LNM are Google, NVIDIA, Meta’s Llama architecture. These are companies with an interest, to put it gently, in all of us becoming comfortable with this technology fast enough to justify the hundreds of billions already spent and the wave of data centers on the way. A beautiful museum where AI is presented as nature’s translator, where the machine is a collaborator and the encounter is tender and the scent of the moonflower closes the show, is an extraordinarily effective piece of that project.

Johns put it to NPR this way: “To me, it’s like the perfect picture of art in late capitalism.” Harsh, and I think basically right. In the critique I mentioned earlier, Johns and Zeilinger found the Serpentine exhibition “overwhelming yet barren,” a “post-apocalyptic requiem memorializing bygone natural environments.” Their conclusion is the sentence I keep coming back to: “Spectacle, no matter how luminous, cannot be a substitute for critical reflection and radical imagination.”

I think the big risk is that we all let this new AI-ified version of greenwashing go unnoticed. I call it greenwashing not because of the remaining question marks about Dataland’s footprint, but because it uses ecological grief and Indigenous cosmology and the recorded voice of an extinct bird to make us feel warmly about a set of technologies whose actual relationship to the living world is, so far, mostly extractive. Right imagery, right themes, and an effect that is the opposite of activating.

What the Alternative Looks Like

I think AI can have a role in ecological thought and imagination, I’m just not sure that Dataland’s version of that is what we actually need.

Superflux’s Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, which I visited earlier in July at the Weltmuseum in Vienna, is the example that comes to mind. They placed four handcrafted sensor-objects along the Thames to listen for birdsong, tides, and atmospheric shifts. Each one feeds a very small specialist model that cross-references what it hears against a larger model trained on British and European weatherlore, the kind of knowledge commercial systems have no reason to prioritize. The output is much less spectacle and more provocation. It’s an invitation to go pay attention to a specific river. The work is small, situated, legible, and it points away from itself and toward the actual world.

Zeilinger and Johns end their critique with a suggestion: demystify the stack, expose the hardware footprints and the dataset lineages, lower the threshold so audiences can contest the thing rather than consume it, and design encounters that distribute agency openly. It can still be beautiful, but I agree with them that we have to pull back the curtain a bit to get anywhere meaningful.

For Your Own Futures

A few things I’d offer, since this is likely just the beginning of a new world of corporate funded attempts to show us how beautiful their AI worlds can be:

• There will be much more of this in the next several years, and the polish will only improve. Take the time to understand AI and the people pushing it, beyond “it’s evil and I want nothing to do with it.” Even if that ends up being your position, know your opponent well enough to argue with them in specifics.

• It’s worthwhile to learn the difference between the types. Large corporate image generators and chatbots are one thing. Small language models, niche models, and edge AI are something else entirely, with different footprints, different politics, and different possibilities. Collapsing them into one category costs you the ability to say anything useful.

• Seek out the artists and speculative designers doing the harder version of this work. They’re less well funded and much less well publicized.

One of the showstopping elements of Machine Dreams: Rainforest is the sound of the last male ʻōʻō, a bird sacred to the local Indigenous People, calling into a forest with nothing left in it to answer. Dataland put that recording in a beautiful room, and then, like always, we exited through the gift shop. I can’t decide if a “save the birds” donation box would’ve made that better or worse.

Until next time,
Kinsey

References:

https://dataland.art/about/large-nature-model

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5894941/ai-art-dataland-refik-anadol

https://www.vulture.com/article/jerry-saltz-moma-refik-anadol-unsupervised.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5894941/ai-art-dataland-refik-anadol

https://www.wallpaper.com/art/exhibitions-shows/dataland-the-museum-of-ai-arts-los-angeles-review

https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/NetworkNotion4december.pdf

https://www.noproscenium.com/does-the-machine-feel-us-dataland-review/

https://superflux.in/index.php/work/nobody-told-me-rivers-dream/#

https://github.com/RefikAnadolStudio

Hello Substack Friends,

This week and next week’s newsletters will be a little bit different because I’m on the road! I’ve set my German brain aside for the next 3 weeks and am back home in California bopping around Los Angeles and then heading up to the Central Valley. So with that in mind, I thought I’d use this opportunity to do a little “Field Work”.

My training in futures work and in cultural anthropology has rewired my brain in such a way that visiting and re-visiting cities has become part holiday and part excavation exercise. Once you’re trained to notice, it’s hard to stop: little signals of emerging culture or change, cultural differences (and believe me, between Los Angeles and Munich there are LOTS), and structural forces at work.

That might sound like a lot of work, but what it really means is running around the city as you normally would, just with ears and eyes that are a little more open.

What is Orange Wine, Anyway?

When I’m in LA I can’t resist popping into Erewhon (their ridiculously overpriced and over-trended grocery chain, home of the $17 Hailey Bieber smoothie) to see what latest “super ingredient” they’re cramming into everything. Last time I was here it was mushrooms and ashwagandha, and while they’re still going strong, the standout this time was actually in the wine section. There’s a newly allocated section devoted entirely to biodynamic, natural, and mostly orange wine. Here’s an exchange between my husband and I on the subject that gave the local woman standing behind us a good laugh:

Me: Oh look, this is that orange wine brand that got Zendaya hammered in that movie I watched on the plane! (”that movie” being The Drama)
Albert: What even is orange wine?
Me: It’s wine that’s orange. (said with overconfidence)
Albert: But is it still made from grapes? Or is it made from oranges?
Me: I have no idea.

Turns out, friends, it’s basically white wine with the grape skins left on during fermentation. Now we know.

On the subject of wine, natural wine seems to be the cultural gold standard at the moment. Double points if it’s ORANGE natural wine. This is fascinating to me coming from the European perspective. In Germany, “Biowein” is typically spoken about with disdain, the more sustainable but much less desirable cousin of classic, tried-and-additive-true wine. It serves an ecological function, but at the expense of experience. In Los Angeles, natural wine is, like most things in the US, a branded experience. It communicates progress, taste, and know-how. It’s a mirror image of the stores they come from: the highly functional organic supermarkets like Denns and Alnatura in Germany versus the consumer spectacles that are Whole Foods and Erewhon.

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Telephone Pole Art: Literal Signs and Signals

Take a walk around Silver Lake and Echo Park, and you’ll start to notice something: every single telephone pole is telling a whole instagram feed’s worth of stories. Trivia night on Tuesdays, Stanley the beagle’s cancer treatment GoFundMe, sidewalk fashion sales, QR codes to vibe-coded queer dating apps. Angelenos know the art of a good street sign, and they seem to also know that in the age of technological overwhelm, an artistically designed (even better, hand-drawn) flyer could very well be the signal of something actually cool and worthy of our hard-won attention.

Hospital of Emotions

Before arriving in LA, I put out a call on social media for locals’ recommendations for the latest and greatest not tourist-trappy, “wow, that’s different” things to do, and several people recommended the Hospital of Emotions, a temporary exhibition space located in a building in a transition: formerly the St. Vincent Medical Center, soon to be a new behavioral health clinic. It’s taken the hospital theme and given it a new twist: each wing features an emotion like anger, joy, grief, and resilience, and offers space for emerging artists to fill a former patient room with art that reflects the theme of their wing. While this is very much an “art for the masses” type exhibition, I found it conceptually incredibly interesting for a couple of reasons:

• Emotions are so complicated in spaces like hospitals, and the concept really opened up the space as viewers for us to unpack those emotions in a slightly guided but flexible way. For example, one room on the joy floor featured a room full of flowers. A woman next to me, talking with her friend, said “I would have put this room on the grief floor. Flowers remind me of the aftermath of someone passing”. In our current time of AI-driven change, emotional literacy is becoming a premium. And this seems like a great example in action of how we can help people process and name emotions.

• Speaking of AI: of course, there was some evidence of AI use amongst the exhibitions. Once you know what Claude writing looks like it takes about .2 seconds to spot it in the wild, and the artist descriptions were rife with over-explained, multi-paragraph artist statements. What that triggered in me was: I immediately stopped reading. Why should I care what Claude has to say about your work as an artist?

• There were also some instances of generated imagery in the exhibitions themselves. Here’s my take: if you want to use Gen AI as an artist, that’s your right and your practice. But if you’re using it because it looks cool and not because it adds to the story you’re trying to tell with your work, that’s where you lose me. For example: there was a really promising room with photographs of elderly people taken during the COVID era dressed up in full drag. The intent seemed to be to tell a story of bringing people joy and facilitating togetherness in a really dark time. But in the middle of the space, taking up a lot of visual energy, was a generated video of a dragged-up woman. For me, that enormously detracted from the rest of the work and what was otherwise a really lovely story.

Scent as Experience

Perfumes and fragrance in general are having a moment: this much I already knew. Scent is a sense that demands physical presence (since the whole smell-o-vision thing didn’t work out), and at a time when everything seems to be about getting off our phones and into the real world, the math maths. Brand that have nothing to do with cosmetics are jumping on board: in The Grove I stumbled across a popup by the brand Kinfolk, a Danish brand known for their home-centered design magazines, launching their new line of fragrance. And in Ktown I stopped by Elorea, a Korean perfume house that’s really tapping into the experiential side of things. Their flagship features a coffee and matcha bar, serving high-craft drinks modeled after a number of their top scents. Kinfolk, by the way, is also producing their scents in Korea. It was beautiful, felt totally luxurious, and the drinks were thankfully delicious and not just insta aesthetic.

Some final rapid-fire observations:

• Seeing delivery robots for the first time in person scooting around homeless encampments while blinking their cute anthropomorphic eyes is a seriously dystopian feeling. Still, I kept having to resist the urge to pat them like dogs.

• On the subject of bots, Waymos are suddenly everywhere and I feel like most of the cars I saw were driving without any passengers. Are they just cruising? Are they not allowed to just chill somewhere?

• Much to my delight (though I didn’t have time to drop in on one) you can’t throw a rock without hitting a pottery studio in LA. The yearning for the handmade is taking over.

• Bookstores are so back, baby. I visited about 5 indie bookstores in as many days, but even good old Barnes and Noble at The Grove is a vibe. Tables everywhere full of fun curated stacks. My favorite was a “Heated Rivalry” table featuring books about famous rivalries. I’m not sure if Joan would be entertained or roll in her grave to see the Didion and Babitz book there.

  

What I find so cool about taking time to write down observations like this is that you pretty quickly start to see patterns that you otherwise might have missed. In this case, one huge red thread really stands out to me: the human touch as a signal of something trustworthy. In the trend world that’s something you hear about a lot as something that’s coming as AI grows in prevalence, but at least in Los Angeles, it is without a doubt already at our doorsteps.

Stay tuned, because I have even more to share next week! Including a fascinating trip to the world’s first ever AI art museum (don’t cancel me just yet, I did it for the research).

Until next time,
Kinsey

This week’s article was inspired by my own journey on social media over the last month or so. I never imagined myself engaging in “content creation”, but to a certain extent it’s a necessary evil in the world of personal brand-building and I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun with it. I’ve been seeing a good amount of growth and engagement, particularly on instagram (if you found me through insta, hello!), but it’s been triggering some thoughts about what it means to ask for attention in the age of the attention economy, and how we can make it feel more human and less yucky. This is a result of those thoughts. Enjoy!

The Holy Algorithm

Attention might be the single most talked-about resource of the moment. Attention spans, attention economies, reclaiming your attention from the doomscroll. Everyone’s clear that we’ve lost something, and everyone has a plan to get it back.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I’ve been more active online in the name of self employment and personal brand-building. Every piece of advice for creating an online presence contains some version of “creating isn’t enough. You have to engage, engage, and engage some more with other people online”. Scroll, like, comment. Do it so the algorithm favors you, so it shows you to other people who are also engaging, and the whole hamster wheel keeps spinning. Attention stops being something you give, but a transaction, something you expect in turn. A unit of barter economics.

The historian D. Graham Burnett and his collaborators, writing as the Friends of Attention, have a blunter word for what this actually is: fracking. “We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives,” they write, “whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market.”

Most of what gets written about attention treats it as a productivity problem: how to heal your attention span to focus longer, scroll less, protect your time. But I think the flaw in this dialogue is that it still treats attention as a resource, in the same way that our extractive systems do. If we want to reclaim attention, we can’t just reclaim the resource, we have to reclaim the definition itself.

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“Attention is the Rarest and Purest Form of Generosity”

That phrase belongs to Simone Weil, made in an essay on school studies of all places. She was actually using it to describe a sort of ideal religious practice. Her view was that the whole point of education is to teach us to pray. But by “prayer”, she means attending, fully, to whatever is in front of you. That could be to a certain Lord and Savior, but it could also be to our studies. our environment, or other people. Toh writes in this essay that for Weil, “to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns and bestowing on them the honour, love, and dignity they were due.” This is why Weil calls attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Not because attention is rare in the sense of scarce, though it is that too, but because giving someone your full attention means putting your own concerns down long enough to actually see them.

Remember the “bird test” that was going around social media some time ago? It comes from a real Gottman study from 2005, where researchers watched newlywed couples make small bids for each other’s attention all day, a comment, a glance, pointing out a bird outside the window, and tracked whether their partner turned toward it or away. Couples who turned toward each other’s bids the vast majority of the time stayed married. The ones who mostly didn’t, mostly didn’t. It’s the same claim Weil is making: love is largely made of the attention you choose to give, moment by moment, to the person asking for it.

Simulated Resonance

This is what makes the attention economy such a strange, dissonant system to live inside. We’re constantly asking for attention, and constantly getting something that looks on the surface like it back in the form of likes, views, comments. But it still feels shallow, still doesn’t feel like being seen.

I don’t believe that social media is inherently shallow. Especially as someone who lives abroad, I deeply appreciate that I still have these little digital windows into the places I’ve left behind. But I do believe that the algorithmic profit machine that social media has been turned into is designed to be shallow, because shallow wells are easier to extract from.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa has a proposal for how to frame this. Rosa’s whole body of work is about what he calls resonance, the sense of actually being touched by something outside yourself. In order for resonance to happen, three things must occur: First, something must touch you, speak to you and your sense of self. Second, you must answer it in turn, exercise agency in engaging in the interaction. Third, you are transformed in the course of the interaction. Social media, he argues, can absolutely accomplish these three things. You get a notification. You respond. You feel something shift. But there’s a fourth element to resonance: it can’t be engineered or manufactured. It has to emerge from a genuine desire for engagement from both parties. And that’s exactly where social media falls apart. An entire industry has been built to manufacture the feeling of resonance rather than allowing it to naturally emerge, and instead we’re left with what Rosa calls alienation, the sense of participating constantly in something that comes close to make us feel seen and understood, but doesn’t.

That’s the gap between attention as generosity and attention as currency. One requires you to actually be changed by what you’re attending to. The other just requires you to keep clicking.

Attentional Sanctuaries

I love Matthew Crawford’s term for the thing being fracked: the attentional commons. His argument is that attention should be treated like a shared, finite resource, the way we treat clean air or fresh water, rather than something each of us has to defend alone through sheer willpower. This really becomes clear when we think about big institutional issues like the current crisis happening within our democratic system. A distracted, misinformed, disconnected population can’t effectively change civic institutions in the way that we need to climb out of this mess we’re in. As Burnett puts it, “What democracy most needs now, is an attentive citizenry, human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

The Friends of Attention are actively working on rebuilding attentional commons through a nonprofit called the Institute for Sustained Attention and have opened a physical sanctuary space in Brooklyn, the Strother School of Radical Attention. It’s a real place where they run people through exercises in noticing, sitting somewhere ordinary and recording everything you’d normally filter out. Done as a group, phones off, it becomes a shared ritual: what I saw, you heard, the same breeze passing both of us.

The Future of Attention

There are many creators out there currently putting out excellent content about helping you heal your attention spans, and that’s not what I want to add to with this article. What I want is to open up the question: how can we not just reclaim our attention, but redefine it? I think it starts with knowing how to look for resonance. Asking: is this touching me, or am I just consuming it? Am I doing this to build actual connection with other people, or am I doing this to participate in the economic system of attention?

I don’t necessarily think the answer is completely getting off the apps, or pretending we can opt out of a system we still have to live inside of, especially while we’re busy trying to build our way toward something better. But we can look for opportunities in the specific places we engage online and the modes by which we engage. Getting off the For You Page and the Reels tab and spending more time with people you already follow. Going deeper in creator’s channels. Testing out the new forms of social media that are smaller, more local, more intimate. Subscribing to their substacks (cough cough*). Writing a thoughtful comment about how much you appreciate someone’s perspective instead of a “💯 so true”.

I don’t know if that adds up to making attention generous again, exactly. But it’s a start.

All the best,

Kinsey

Dear Substack friends,

First, a small note: I can’t believe there are almost 50 of you now! That sounds like such a small number, but considering how recently 90% of you were people I knew IRL, this seriously feels like a huge win. This is not the place for insane follower numbers like Instagram or Tiktok, but I really feel like the value here is so much higher and I appreciate each of you so much for taking the time and engaging with good old long form content. So just a quick thank you for being the first to see me and what I’m doing and here’s to the next 50! If you have any feedback- something you liked, something you’d like to see more of, etc., I’d love to hear it.

Today marks 5 weeks since I officially left my full time job to rebuild my working life from scratch. Most people leave when the new venture is already off the ground, but I decided to take the leap a bit earlier. In part because my mental health required it, and in part because I had the feeling that one of the best things I could do in this moment when so many of us are going through transitions is doing the work publicly and collaboratively. If you missed it, you can check out my longer explainer video about my thought process below.

It’s amazing how under the right conditions, an unbelievable amount of growth can occur in a very short timespan. I’ve tried all sorts of new things (like the above video and video content in general which was SCARY for someone who’s been more or less a social media lurker for years), experimented, tested, and iterated. It’s more than just getting my spark back, I feel like I’m dancing around my own personal bonfire of joy.

Since I’ve agreed to take you along with me in this process, I thought I’d share some of the things that have stuck out to me during the last few weeks. If you’re also considering leaving your job and doing something for yourself, you might find them helpful.

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#1: Be Seen

Contrary to what the current internet discourse often suggests, I don’t think everyone needs to become an influencer as part of their personal brand. However, I do think it’s absolutely essential to create the conditions where people can find you, see how you think, understand what you offer, and remember you when opportunities arise. Networking isn’t just going around and meeting people or sending Linkedin messages, it’s creating content (whatever that means to you) in places where people can find it at their own pace. For me that’s mostly been talking head content, but it can be anything. Print out flyers and leave them in cafés. Actually, in a world that’s starting to appreciate analog again, that might be really effective.

#2: Do the Identity Work

We’re in a the beginnings of a new era of work that embraces hyphens. I actually talked about that quite a bit in my last article:

What that means is that there is space for me to show up as my authentic “Designer-Futurist-Anthropologist-Ceramicist-Writer-Teacher-Coach” self. But what that means is we are required to understand which parts of ourselves we want to bring into our working lives, which need support to grow, and which former parts we want to let go. Leaving a traditional salaried job has been an amazing moment to open up that stream of identity work and start thinking more concretely about who I am, what I value, and how I want to spend my time.

#3: Introduce Yourself

I believe that one of the smartest moves I made was to go to a conference in my second week of solo mode. I talked to all sorts of people in my field and had to introduce myself, say what I do and what my USP was, over and over and over. The first couple times were pretty clunky, but by the third day of the conference I felt much more confident in my ability to state it quickly and clearly. It’s part of the game to have imposter syndrome in the early days, especially when you’re saying things like “I run workshops for people in career transition” before ever having actually done one, but this was a great way to rip the bandaid off.

#4: Experimentation over Perfection

The early days of building something will be an experiment, but how exciting is that? The amount of variety and the sheer number of new things I’ve tried in the past month has been deeply fulfilling in its own rite, just because it’s given me the opportunity to expand my ideas about what I can do, how I can spend my time, and who I can be. If you’re operating online, having a small number of followers is actually a great moment to try stuff out with very little fallout when it doesn’t work. Perfection will come with time, but especially in today’s era of sharing everything, building and experimenting in public is a really free, fun time.

As I write this, I’m on a train to Vienna to meet some people I’ve admired from afar on Linkedin for a long time. Because I can do that on a Tuesday now, how cool is that? And, for the first time, I feel like I have something to offer them in return. As I said, I’m dancing around the bonfire. Maybe I’ll make s’mores.

All the best,
Kinsey

Welcome to the first edition of a new series I’m calling “Foregone Conclusions” The premise is simple: for every area of life, there are a number of baseline assumptions or “truths” we have come to accept. Truths about what must be and will always be. Things that seem fundamental to how those areas of life are built and operate. Foregone Conclusions will take those truths and ask: are they really set in stone? Can we find signals of things emerging that are placing those truths on shaky ground? This is what futurism is meant for: calling everything into question. Refusing to accept anything as absolute. Imagining, aspiring, and asking “what if?”

Dear Substack friends,

Today I’d like to talk about work. Those of you who’ve been following along for a little while know that this is a near and dear topic to me (if you’re new, catch up at the link below).

About a month ago I quit my agency job to dive headfirst into my own, multifaceted version of a career. I made the plunge because everything in my body was telling me that this is where the future lies: not in the stable, salaried life I’d been trained to aim for but in something richer, more human, more personal. And it seems that something is in the air, because my informal research (aka asking my friends) tells me that many of us are having very similar feelings. So, work seems like a natural place to start. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

The Assumptions

In many ways, the majority of our lives as adolescents and young adults is geared towards preparing us to enter the job market. Helping us to understand what’s expected of us, learning how to perform and behave like professionals, and honing in on a field, skill, or trade that will become our seal of approval as productive members of society. The backbone of this is built of a couple key assumptions:

• The 40-hour salaried job will continue to be the safest, most stable option.

• The ideal path is still linear: school, work, retire.

• Most of us will have one singular job title.

Basically: unless you’re a “creative” type (and what does that even mean?), the average career path will be training for a job and finding a company to pay you a nice salary to come in and do that job every day. That’s the dominant narrative. But what if that changed?

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Counter-Signals

To challenge these assumptions and look for other ways that the future might play out, let’s look at some things that are currently happening that point us towards a different narrative:

The “Portfolio Career”

The idea of a “portfolio career,” several income streams and roles held at once instead of one full-time job, is gaining tons of traction lately. This isn’t only a story about people scraping by, either: more than half of multiple-jobholders now hold a college degree. Signs point to the single, all-encompassing job becoming one option among several rather than the default.

Employers Adopting Gig Work and Flexible Hiring Models

We’ve come a long way from the days of Uber emerging as a groundbreaking business model. Especially as AI takes hold, more companies are exploring how different employment types like project-based, blended teams might help their bottom line. And we’re not just talking about service-heavy jobs. White collar roles might really be the next to live on a dashboard.

Increasing Self-Employment

For a number of reasons, the rates of self-employment have been skyrocketing lately with no signs of stopping. Not as side hustles, but as full-time independent work that spans all fields. For many this could be out of necessity, but I think a large number of us (myself included) are looking for more autonomy and see the changing ecosystem of jobs as an opportunity to build it.

Core Skills Are Changing, Fast

Finally, the ground under any single skill set is shifting. We simply no longer live in a world where the skills we need to succeed in our jobs are stable enough to be learned in school and carry us through our careers. If you work in tech, you’re lucky if your toolset survives from one month to the next.

New Assumptions, New Visions

If all of those signals continue to play out the way that we see them now, the world starts to look quite different. Decades from now, our assumptions about work could look something like this:

• Security will come from your capacity to build a resilient career and identity, not the job you hold.

• The career path will be non-linear, with pauses, reframes, and transitions built into the systems.

• The singular job title will be out of vogue in favor of a unique, personal, ever-evolving formulation of what makes us, “us” and how we make our money. No “main job” and no “side hustle.”

This isn’t to say that jobs as we know them are going to disappear, but the point is that the dominant narrative of what working life is supposed to look like could easily look quite different than how it looks today. On our way to this future, any number of new factors could come into play that might bring new assumptions to the table or make the likelihood of another assumption manifesting even higher. Our job as futurists is to keep our eyes open and to find ways to prepare ourselves for these possible futures, today.

One quick caveat before we get to the how. “Grow your own resilience” is much easier to do with a floor under you than without one. That same WEF report finds that of the workers who’ll need retraining by 2030, a meaningful share simply won’t get it. So some of this is yours to build, and some of it is a collective question about what supports we decide to put in place.

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What to Watch

• Legislation on gig work and worker classification. This is the big one, and it swings fast: in the US, enforcement of contractor-protection rules was rolled back in 2025, while the EU’s Platform Work Directive is pushing the other way. Which direction your country moves will shape whether flexible work feels like freedom or vulnerability.

• Portable benefits: healthcare, retirement, and protections that follow the worker instead of the employer. Whether these materialize determines how survivable non-traditional work actually is.

• New products, services, and tools built for the multi-faceted career, the infrastructure (accounting, insurance, community, coordination) that a portfolio life needs to stop feeling like improvisation.

• AI’s move up the skill ladder, from automating tasks to reshaping which roles exist at all.

How to Prepare

• Do the identity work. If your title is no longer going to answer “who are you,” you need another answer, and it’s better to build it deliberately than to have the market hand you one.

• Unpack what actually matters to you, separate from what you were trained to want. The linear path made a lot of these choices for you; without it, they’re yours to make.

• Make space for your facets. The parts of you that don’t fit a single job description aren’t distractions from your career; increasingly they might be the career.

• Don’t count anything out. Roles that look secure can hollow out, and work that’s undervalued now (care, craft, the deeply human stuff) may be exactly where value moves.

• Build your floor where you can, and notice where you can’t. Save what you’re able to, yes, but also pay attention to which supports are collective, because those are the ones worth organizing and voting for rather than white-knuckling alone.

There are a lot of very legitimate things to fear about the future of work, and a lot of that comes from the systems that we’ve held as fundamentally true starting to crumble. But as the name of this series suggests, it’s not a foregone conclusion. Personally, I actually feel pretty optimistic about what’s in store for us. We just (just, I know) have to keep ourselves oriented and keep the necessary powers accountable.

Until next time,
Kinsey

It feels like the world is really going through it right now. Fascism and war are all on the rise, we’re flying past planetary boundaries and towards tipping points, global health emergencies are popping up left and right. I also saw a John Oliver segment last night about how feral hogs are outsmarting us and taking over the US, so there’s that. I’m definitely no stranger to the feeling of wanting to fix everything, to take responsibility for the world because for god’s sake, someone has to! But the problem is, the responsibilities don’t stop there.

Somehow at the same time, we’re supposed to take care of ourselves. You’re supposed to make sure you’re getting the optimal amount of sleep. Take your GLP-1s so we don’t get (god forbid) fat. Stay connected with loved ones. Watch your carbon footprint. Learn about all the things that you thought were helping your carbon footprint but actually making it worse. Girl and boy boss your way into financial security — but be sure to closely monitor your mental health so you don’t burn out! If you do burn out, make sure you’ve got enough cash in hand to go for that weekend meditation retreat or hike the Camino de Santiago like all the Tiktok girlies are doing. If you can’t afford that, I’m sure there’s an app that will help: for the low, low price of a $20 monthly subscription fee and your life in data.

I think it’s safe to say that anyone who’s paying attention right now is overwhelmed. We feel this sense that we should be carrying more, doing more, fixing more. That if we tracked the right metrics, said yes to the right causes, optimized the right habits, we might actually be able to help. Because we sure can’t rely on the old institutions to do it for us.

Here’s the thing, though: we’re feeling responsible for the world because the systems that we have in place are designed to give us that feeling. Late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism thrive when we feel we have to take on more, and in turn consume more in the name of helping us to take on more, better. As wrote recently in The Noosphere:

“the greater the systemic problem, the greater the individual’s responsibility to somehow fix it themselves.”

The fix that isn’t

Let’s look at the Femtech market as an example — software, services, wearables, etc focused on female health and reproductive care. Femtech is expected to grow in market value from $40B in 2024 to nearly $100B by 2030. Why? Because the healthcare industry has huge gaps in it, women aren’t getting the care they need, private industry is very happy to help fill that gap. On top of all of the extra care work that typically falls to women, we’re now expected to monitor our own bodies and needs. Then take into account that we’re in the post-Roe v. Wade era, when women are even more at risk for facing serious consequences for those decisions we make for our bodies. Especially if the powers-that-be have data to back it up: “your app told you you were ovulating, therefore terminating your pregnancy is first degree murder” type stuff.

Women are simultaneously at-risk and responsible for managing that risk through self-surveillance, with the data-tracking sold as empowerment. The very features that claim to enhance autonomy are also key mechanisms of behavioral control and surveillance. Our agency, sold back to us as a subscription. But hey, at least we get notifications to stop at CVS to buy tampons.

, writing in her Substack piece The Ozempicization of the Economy, has done the sharpest diagnostic work I’ve come across on why this keeps happening. Her argument is that the optimization economy can’t actually deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition. The fix needs you to keep needing it. Femtech only works in a market where the system doesn’t support us on its own. “Optimization is the process, control is the desire, and agency is the branding,” she writes. It’s revealing that Silicon Valley’s word of the moment is agency.

To put it shortly, here’s why we’re feeling so stuck: we need to act. That’s clear. But how do we act in a way that doesn’t let institutions off the hook, that doesn’t perpetuate the neoliberal machine, and doesn’t make us burn out and wallow in despair? Great question.

A better map

Most people who’ve spent any time in the self-help circuit have come across Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and its circles of control, influence, and concern. You have things you can directly control (your actions, your responses), things you can influence but not determine (relationships, certain outcomes), and things that sit in your awareness as concerns but that you can’t act on: geopolitical events, the algorithm, the news. The idea is to focus on the inner circles and stop burning yourself out on the outer one.

Generally, I do think this model can be helpful. But I think that despite its intentions to help you narrow in on the things in your area of control and let go of the things you can’t, it does so within the exact framing of personal productivity and responsibility that I want to question. Why is that?

• it’s static. The circles are drawn at a single point in time, which makes anything in the outer ring feel like a permanent verdict on your powerlessness.

• you’re alone. The model gives you “me” and “me, indirectly.” There’s no “us.” So anything that can’t be moved by a single person lands in concern by default and sits there, accumulating weight.

• there’s no critical lens. If something is in your realm of control, should it be? Its it a responsibility that has been inflicted on you due to institutional failure? Is it a solution to a manufactured need?

So here’s my version:

There are a couple changes you might notice:

A fourth zone. What’s outside any individual’s influence, but inside our collective influence. The entire logic of the optimization economy depends on keeping this zone invisible. If everything is your problem to solve individually, you keep buying solutions. But a lot of what’s sitting in your concern ring doesn’t belong to you personally. It belongs to a category that only moves with other people.
Two time horizons The things that fall into the different zones can likely shift depending on how far out you look. Something stuck in your concern ring right now can sit inside your influence ring at a three to five-year zoom.

Try it out for yourself.

Do a brain dump. Write down everything you feel responsible for, everything you’re worried about. Don’t filter. If it wakes you up at 3am or makes you feel vaguely guilty in the shower, it goes on the list.

Place your thoughts. Go through the list and put each item into one of the four zones as they stand right now, this week. If you’re not sure, it probably belongs further out than you think.

Trace them back. For everything in your inner two zones, ask two questions: did you choose this responsibility, or was it placed here? and Is there a way I can solve for my needs without enabling systems that profit from my distress?

A lot of the weight we’re carrying didn’t arrive neutrally. Some of it was actively installed by systems that benefit from our feeling personally responsible. The original carbon footprint calculator, the thing that made your individual consumer choices the primary measure of your climate impact, was invented by a PR firm working for BP. A deliberate strategy to shift the moral weight of fossil fuel emissions from the industry producing them onto the people heating their homes. Your carbon guilt? Partially manufactured. Your concern for the climate? Completely real. Those are different things, and separating them is one of the first steps in offloading some of our overwhelm.

Asking “was this placed on me?” doesn’t automatically mean you stop doing the thing. Sometimes it does: a lot of individual guilt around consumer choices can go, especially when it was installed to deflect accountability away from the industries actually responsible. But sometimes you still need the action, like the tracking app. In those cases, what changes isn’t the action. It’s where you direct the guilt. Instead of inward (at yourself, for not fixing it) it goes outward, toward the structural cause. Find the people already working on it. That’s where the political energy belongs.

Project into the future. Once you’ve traced it, what remains in your outer zones should be concerns you actually chose: things that are real and belong to you things that you really want to see change and could imagine yourself acting upon. Then, look at the second circle.

Does the time horizon change anything? A lot of things that feel impossible right now are very much in your influence at a three to five-year zoom. “AI is going to make my work obsolete” is concern territory this quarter. At five years, it becomes a set of actual decisions: what skills to build, what kind of work to move toward, which bets to start making now. Push the horizon and ask what slides inward.

And: is this mine to move alone, or does it need other people? Some concerns only shift through coordination, collective pressure, or policy change. Those don’t belong on your personal to-do list. They belong in the question: who is already working on this, and how do I find them?

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What you’re allowed to put down

Consider this your permission to stop carrying everything that actually lives outside individual and collective influence at any honest time horizon. Not because you don’t care, but because carrying it as though it’s yours to fix isn’t caring. It’s paralysis with a clean conscience, and it costs you the energy you need for the things that actually are yours.

Not everything in your concern ring got there because you failed. Some of it got there because institutions abdicated and handed you the bill. Some of it arrived through the sheer volume of information we live inside of, which makes global suffering feel personally addressable if only you tried harder, tracked better, cared in the right ways.

Moving Forward

At the end of this exercise you’ll have three piles: What’s mine to act on. What I can move together with other people, so I need to find them. And what belongs to forces much higher and larger than those in my reach.

Don’t underestimate the power of focusing on the innermost circle. There are some serious mental health benefits to focusing on action within your immediate surroundings: tangible, smaller things that you can see the result of quickly. Starting a garden. Practicing a new skill. Making people around you feel seen and appreciated. All of that matters, even if it seems insignificant. Once we start there and feel like we’re making progress, the rest doesn’t feel so scary.

If you want to dive deeper, here are a few of the works that inspired this article:

Kyla Scanlon, “The Ozempicization of the Economy”

Katie Javgielnicka, “Who Gets to Be Happy in an Individualistic, Capitalist Economy”

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015).
The full theoretical argument behind why we experience collective problems as personal failures

Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (1986, English translation 1992) — on why the risks of our moment are structurally diffuse and nearly impossible to pin on any single actor