Rather Suspect

How will we navigate the post-pandemic world? What’s the world going to look like after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, whatever the outcome? What do we need to do to mitigate the effects of climate change? What economic policies need to be put into place to deal with inflation?

Lately, things feel…bleak. Dark. Going in the wrong direction. These negative events are unfolding and it seems our job is just to figure out how to deal with them.

It’s like we’re all on a ship crossing the Atlantic and a storm has arisen, the boat has sprung a leak, and a third of our supplies have gotten swept overboard. It’s an “all hands on deck” moment where everyone is rushing around trying to patch the ship up, tying down the remaining supplies, and doing everything we can to keep the boat from capsizing.

This is part of how things go sometimes. When there’s a fire, you don’t have much choice. You have to put out the fire before moving on.

But the trouble today is many of our “fires” are broad and slow-burning. Climate change unfolds over decades. Dealing with pandemics takes years and involves billions of people. Inflation impacts seemingly hundreds of industries across an interconnected global economy. And global politics feels as challenging as ever.

And so trying to “fix” everything feels — hard. To me it does.

But one reason I believe it feels so hard is we’re not looking in the right direction. We’re reacting to things that have already happened rather that proactively creating scenarios that we wish to happen. It’s like we’ve forgotten the whole point of why we boarded the ship in the first place.

I don’t want to mitigate climate change. I want to design a planetary environment where energy is so clean, renewable and abundant that humans and the natural world thrive.

I don’t want to minimize inflation. I want to invent new economic systems where every human on the planet has their basic needs met and everyone (regardless of where they are born) has numerous opportunities to create and share what makes them the most happy.

I don’t want to just get past the latest pandemic and then continually worry about a future one. I want to dream up a set of scientific and healthcare systems wherein humans gain such a deep understanding of the building blocks of biology that the very idea of a pandemic fades into the past.

And I don’t want to deal with political issues in such a way that leads to massive military build-ups and a new Cold War. I want to create entirely new political and economic systems such that the very idea that destroying in order to gain “new territory” becomes ridiculous.

I don’t want to live in a post-pandemic, post-inflationary, post-Cold War, post-fossil fuel world. I want to retire the word “post” and replace it with “pre.” I want to live in a pre-thriving, pre-peaceful, pre-abundant world — and then I want to work as hard as I can to remove the word “pre” from all of these so that these goals become manifest as quickly as possible.

The 1920’s were called the Roaring Twenties. I think we need to define the 2020’s as the Thriving Twenties, the Innovation Twenties, the Breakthrough Twenties. I don’t want this to be the decade that came “after” so much trouble — I want this to be the decade that comes “before” so much joy.

Let’s imagine the next generation not asking “what was it like when the environment was so much better?” Let’s imagine them asking “how was it living through the most exciting time in recent history? Were you even aware at the time how great you were making everything?”