What is the Future Normal? Will we like it there?
When people talk about the future, it is often tinged with the fear that everything could go wrong. With this book, my co-author Henry Coutinho-Mason and I wanted to present an alternative perspective — because we can only build the future we can imagine. We do this through sharing a collection of emerging trends that are both positive and based on reality. We want people to be inspired by the world-changing innovations (and the instigators behind them) that we discovered while writing this book.
I have been studying our shared culture to curate trends for more than a decade now, and I’ve learned how to anticipate the ‘likely.’ Henry and I often describe ourselves as reluctant futurists. We believe our work is better described as ‘near futurism’ — a quest to catalog and understand the implications of the biggest innovations on our lives today and over the next few years. The greatest question we found ourselves asking as we wrote the book was, ‘What if things go right?’
The fact is, the ideas and innovations that catch on and expand are all closely tied to human needs. If you look back through history, you will see that many of our fundamental motivations have barely changed over centuries. The need to feel secure. The desire to be loved as they are today. People’s fundamental needs evolve at a much slower pace than the innovations that cater to them, if they evolve at all.
