Calmer Future

Overview

I’m going to share my vision of a calmer future.

We currently face daunting challenges: climate change, habitat loss, economic insecurity, rising inequality, and the rise of a populist authoritarian movements.

I want to show you how we can all live our best lives peacefully, free from existential economic and social pressures, even as our vast population rises and falls. How we can still leave space for nature to thrive, and both time and access for us to enjoy it too. This calmer future will be sustainable on Earth, into the far future, with just enough technology to support meaningful lives, and livelihoods.

Our deepest problems are interlocked and structural. We can't reach a calmer future trying to fix these separately. The obvious solutions to each part of our polycrisis has been tried individually – and failed.

We need to change tracks. I will show you a radical hopeful vision, which creates new insights and holistic solutions, radical paradigm shifts and technologies, to resolve our deepest problems.

Our current infrastructure paradigms have reached the end of the road. Legacy transport networks are so expensive to build and operate, we have to move close to where good transport links already exist. The resulting overcrowded megacities drive up the costs of living for everyone, wherever they live.

New, cheap, combined infrastructure will reduce social and economic pressures, and make small cities attractive, viable and vibrant to live in.

Overheating megacities have complex economic causes and impacts. We share an abundant world, but our amazing industrial productivity collides with infrastructure bottlenecks to create vast pressures. The cost of things has fallen, but the cost of living keeps rising. Ethical companies struggle to make profits, inflated returns on investments crowds out sustainable business, while wages and workforces are aggressively shrunk. These economic pressures also hamstring modern states, through falling tax revenues and rising social costs.

Chasing growth, competitiveness or cutting regulations will not resolve the real pressures, but only cause further environmental and social damage.

Our problems may seem cultural – caused by individual or political choices, weak leadership, and flawed historical legacies. Compelling narratives focus on class conflicts, identify scapegoats, or moral failings such as greed, with subconscious religious undercurrents. Cultural ideas about competition and success also subtly normalise global inequality and persistent conflict.

Such cultural explanations are emotionally compelling, but distract us from the less obvious systemic causes we need to address.

Working backwards from a future we want may sound simplistic. I only found these ideas after working on the more obvious solutions, in each sector, first, and then by thinking about the world I wanted to live in. I'll share my journey, and the reasons why I keep looking for deeper solutions.