The present is reality’s workshop. It is where scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, teachers, artists, activists, farmers, journalists, and policymakers collectively construct the world we inhabit. The present is where things happen. We live at the crest of the breaking wave of time.
As soon as we make something, it becomes part of the past, a brick in history’s foundation. The moment we pass a law, adopt a puppy, discover a new scientific principle, publish a blog post, solve a problem, start a business, or ask someone on a date, it forms the context for the next moment. We stand in the present, forging the past.
The future is not our destination. It is our great constraint: We can only build what we can imagine. The future is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a shared dream to be realized through shared effort, a horizon of infinite possibilities limited only by our vision.
The future consists not of atoms or bits, but imagination. It is not the endpoint of a deterministic trend, but contingent and always subject to reinvention. The future is a question to be answered by what we choose to do next.
We need stories to contextualize important questions without easy answers. We all imagine possible futures all the time. What do we want to be when we grow up? What should we make for lunch? What if we dropped everything to travel to a distant land? What kind of world are we leaving to our children? To be human is to speculate.
Source: Speculative Fiction Writes the Future on Every. Author’s Substack: The Possibility Engine | Substack.