I’ve had a career as a futurist and here’s the life advice I’m giving my kids
Whilst no one can predict the future accurately, 100s of hours spent investigating what might happen has given me lots of content to curate some future life advice
I’ll preface by saying it’s impossible to predict the future. One word to sum that up. Covid. There are always unknowns, arguably far more of them in the current times we live in. We are living with what is sometimes nicknamed a ‘permacrisis’. A rapidly-changing world that is always moving, often at speeds we struggle to keep pace with. We are now deep into the digital revolution and what a time it’s been. And we’re only getting started. Whilst the future is not certain, there is a method to futuring where you can have a ruddy good go. There are enough certains or ‘likelys’ out there and endless data to track that help piece together what could happen. I’m not going to get into that process here, I’m only mentioning it because the context is important. I’ve spend 100s and 100s of hours, hired by various companies, to give them a portal into the future and it’s amazing how much of it over my career has come true. All of this dissecting of the corners of society, looking at trends and putting it into the mixing pot to come up with dystopian and utopian scenarios of what could be, has been perhaps a more unusual backdrop to experiencing parenting. I clocked pretty early on into my motherhood that I don’t think like most people. I have a very vivid imagination, like to dream a lot and combined with this job role at times felt like I was on another planet to a lot of parents.
Around 2010, the year the ipad was launched giving kids their taste of true device autonomy, there was increasing buzz about teaching kids to code. I remember having a conversation with a parent who was enthusiastic about her child showing a good grasp of coding - they were going all in. Their ticket to future success! I recall casually dropping something like ‘it’s funny how there’s so much excitement about teaching kids coding even though it will be obsolete by the time they are old enough to be employed’, before noticing the look in her eyes and trying to backtrack and find a way to stop sounding like a pessimistic weirdo. In hindsight I must confess, think I might have done this kind of thing a lot. It was like having some kind of tick where something someone would share snapped me into these visions I had been curating gazing 10,20,30 years into the future. These projects can get really intense and take over. I still do some futuring work, but I’m happy to say I think I’ve curbed this habit now. I am still always the ‘weird Barbie’ mum at the school gate though.
So what have I learned? Have this type of work changed the way I live life and make decisions? Sort of.
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