Visionary

I grew up in an age of realism. The ball was real; so too the bat. And the house, car, stove. Later we learned other words like fast, hot, cold and so forth. Then these words were joined to the other words and sentences were formed.

From this we practiced speech and conversation. Then reading. Followed by writing.

We dealt with the real in the here and now.

As schooling advanced to higher forms of logic we learned verb tenses – past, present, future. Later we were taught to form questions and seek answers. The ‘why, how, where’ statements came into our lives.

History was the past. Present is now. And the future is yet to be.

Still blocks of concepts rooted to the real.

With ‘future’, however, something snapped. What will be tomorrow is the future. OK. I get that. But what comes after tomorrow? What will longer term future look like? Feel like? Act like?

At night as a kid dreams formed easily in our sleep. Some were so good we serialized them and continued them night after night. Who knows how this worked out but a sense of future came into our lives at some time and in some fashion.

Dealing with the future is often left to dreamers, but then a negative value attaches to that. Dreamers are thought to be unhitched from reality and not very credible. Engineers, on the other hand, design systems that function in ways that previous systems didn’t. The role of designers emerged, and they worked mostly with how things looked, appeared.

Finally someone sat down and imagined what a future age or culture would look like. How would we move around on land? In the air possibly? On the oceans, too. How would locomotion of our transport happen? What forces would propel us distances? And what effect would this have on how we lived?

Dreamers dream. Engineers build. Scientists research. Historians study the past in eras of cause, effect and result. They do this so we can understand the present better. And maybe hint at the future, too? Anthropologists study cultures and how they worked, interconnected with other cultures, and morphed into yet different cultures. The passage of time and the humans then present acted with and upon others to produce what changed living conditions.

And if such changes can occur naturally, what would be the result if we intentionally engineered cultural change? What then would be happening, and would it be good and valued, or bad and destructive of what we value?

Conjurers of future conditions were not trusted very much. Today, however, we call them visionaries or futurists. They peer into the future to form ideas of what might be.

And such is valuable to all of us. If nothing changes in how we live today, what will result? What will happen? Living in any manner has consequences. We burn fuel for power and transport. We burn fuel for cool air and heated air. We eat and produce garbage, sewerage and so on. We consume water and the waste from that consumption produces waste water that goes where? We turn on the tap at the kitchen sink and it goes down the drain to where?

So simple these questions but really they are complex. All systems of mankind’s time on the planet are complex. Cause, effect, result – is the tempo of time, of history, and of culture’s consumption of resources. What becomes of all of this? What must we deal with that we didn’t calculate for?

Thinkers live among us. They think on these things and they produce ideas, concepts and designs that we later adopt. The cell phone is one of those ‘things’. So are all forms of travel and transport. Medical research and medicines, surgical procedures and a host of medical tests. These are things of today imagined in the past to produce a future.

Envisioning the future is a discipline. It is a calling, too. It is a functionality that is very valuable. It can warn us of dangers impending; it can identify changes ahead that are inescapable. Then, so it can imagine the good that can be.

All of this is about change, of course. The one immutable factor of life is change – or really there are three, right?  Birth, death, change. What happens between birth and death is what we call life. But that is characterized by change.

So let’s get with this element called ‘change’. Let’s deal with it intelligently.

Visionaries are still not trusted. But I ask each of us to look at our jobs and careers. What changes are imminent? What changes are planned? What changes are inevitable? What is seemingly a constant today is a mist tomorrow and replaced by something else.

Whole industries have disappeared. Whole new industries have appeared. It is easy to see that jobs are subject to change all the time. So let us constantly be preparing for what is yet to come. That is ‘where’ we will be living in the tomorrows ahead. The ‘how’ will take care of itself, but the reality is as much with us today as it will be tomorrow.

Why don’t we have a society of visionaries? Maybe we do. If we don’t, we ought.

April 24, 2017