Worried about the future?

Starting a new topic for a class of tertiary students, I set the scene with an exercise.  What was life like in the past?  Small groups summarised the main factors at different times: 200, 100, 50, 20 and five years ago, followed by a discussion of the results.  The groups then speculated as to what life would be like in the future at the equivalent distances in time.  In discussion, it became clear that the incremental progress and improvement of the past would not continue.  The discussion of the future could be summarised as "Fewer opportunities, higher taxes and less pay in a crowded, polluted world".

If this is your outlook, I would recommend you read "The Shift" by Lynda Gratton.  This book discusses the themes and forces that affect our world and provides a solid framework to make sense of it and plan for the opportunities that will undoubtedly arise.  The power of the book is not that it provides "the answers" as much as it guides you to find the answers that apply for you.  There is a free accompanying workbook that can be obtained through: http://www.hotspotsmovement.com/ ("Resources", "The Shift", "Download The Shift Workbook") in which you can put your ideas into action.

The bleak and pessimistic future reminded of a story in John Watson's excellent book "A Terrible Beauty. The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind".  In the Introduction, he wrote:

"Interviewed on BBC television in 1997, shortly before his death, Sir Isiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, was asked what had been the most surprising thing about his long life.  He was born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Jewish timber merchant, and was seven and a half years old when he witnessed the start of the February Revolution in Petrograd from the family's flat above a ceramics factory. He replied, 'The mere fact that I shall have lived so peacefully and so happily through such horrors.  The world was exposed to the worst century there has ever been from the point of view of crude inhumanity, of savage destruction of mankind, for no good reason,...And yet, here I am, untouched by all this,...That seems to me quite astonishing'."

You can view the full interview here.

Stop worrying - it may never happen.