What Type of Future Are We Creating?
Negative imaging today might be creating negative future outcomes
Welcome to the Gazebo! Grab a cup of coffee and join me for some tips to help you succeed at the intersection of management, communication, and technology.
This Week’s Summary:
Most of our major books and movies are about dystopias.
This may be biasing our perception of future possibilities.
Some believe that what we visualize has a high likelihood of becoming our future reality.
If our future perception is dystopic will that become our reality?
What can we do about it?
This post has a lot more questions than it has answers. They are important questions and I hope you take a few minutes to consider them for yourself. In the long run, we will all be working together to find the answers.
Last week I heard an interview with Kathryn Murdoch, daughter-in-law of Rupert Murdoch of Fox news, where she talked about her concern about the future that we may unknowingly be creating for our children.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
Murdoch mentioned that while talking to her early teen daughter she realized that her daughter saw the future as “bleak” and Murdoch couldn’t understand why?
Her daughter put it this way. “Look at all the young adult books [that] are dystopias. Look at the television shows. Look at the films. Everything about the future is dystopian.”
Murdoch didn’t believe it and set out, unsuccessfully it turned out, to prove her daughter wrong. Ouch!
Thinking that Murdoch must not have looked hard enough, I looked for myself, and I encourage you to do the same. I’d appreciate your posting those you find in the comments. If your search comes up like mine it will be a short list.
Believe me when I say that I enjoyed the Mad Maxx series and many other great dystopic movies along with everyone else. But there MUST be some other non-Sci Fi movies out there that have a positive view of the future. Blade Runner? No. Hunger Games? Definite No. Walking Dead? Heck No. Look at the name of the show! Soylent Green? Not here either but I guess it did introduce recycling to help our food supply. Dark joke, I know. Terminator? I suppose after the fall of Skynet, but it stops there.
The closest I could come to something positive was The Day After Tomorrow which involved a major natural disaster that forced different countries to work together on a crisis basis. But what happened a month or a year after the end of the movie? How did the people of the Earth respond in the longer term?
You could go all the way back to 1951 for the Sci Fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still for a movie that presented uncontestable global destruction unless the people of Earth united in a positive unified way (sound like any problem we may have today?), but it stopped when the spaceship took off. What did the people of Earth do? What did it look like a year or a decade afterwards?
What could have happened next? What would I want to have happened next? Much to my dismay, I drew a blank for both questions and found that I don’t have a clear picture of what a realistic positive future would have looked like. It bothered me.
I have always lived under the assumption that if I could visualize something, it was more likely to happen. Conversely, if I was not clear in my own mind about what I wanted then I shouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t get it.
Which leads me to believe that if we don’t collectively have an idea of how we want the future to look, it will unfold in a sort of haphazard billiard ball way which is a little frightening based on the chaos happening all around us.
Having been raised in a tumultuous time like the 1960s I got firsthand experience of what can happen when people pulled together. Young people protesting in the 1960s helped to end a war, to change the voting age from 21 to 18 (a big deal that is rarely mentioned), to outlaw segregation, to start Earth Day, to allow longer hair in schools (this was important when I had hair), and to topple a president (although I guess he did most of that to himself). I grew up believing that the future can be a better place and leaving the world “better than I found it” became one of my key life tenets.
Maybe Star Trek had something to do with it as well. I’ve been a huge fan from day one! Sure, there was conflict and drama, but the Starship Enterprise had a crew made up of people from different races and backgrounds, working together to solve common problems. So, what’s the problem?
In thinking about all of this, it appears to me that there may be two key perceptional concepts at play when thinking about a new, better future. The first is loss aversion which is that our fear of losing something is perceived as greater than our excitement about gaining something. The second is motivation theory which offers a framework for getting people to want to change from where they are to a different and hopefully better place.
Why these two? First, fear of losing what we have today can create stumbling blocks and seriously constrain potential future creative options. Second, if people cannot see a future that looks better than what they believe they have today, then why should they change? We will take a deeper look at loss aversion and motivation theory in next week’s edition.
Here comes the question part:
1. Can you think of any movies that project a positive view of the future?
2. What type of negative and positive exposure are you (and your children) seeing related to what the future will look like?
3. How do we balance the fun of watching a great dystopia movie with the need to create a more positive image of future possibilities?
4. Is this “much ado about nothing” as Shakespeare would say? Do you perceive that this is a problem, like Kathryn Murdoch, or not?
5. What are some of the things that you are already doing, or could be doing, to leave the world better than you found it?
I value your thoughts and hope you will tell us what you think about all of this.
Have a great week!
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