The World We Were Born Into No Longer Exists
This pin keeps cropping up across platforms. Perhaps you too, like me, find it jarring and uncomfortable…full of nostalgic dread.
It's also true.
But… instead of locking into nostalgia-mode, instead let’s imagine all the babies being born right now and fast-forward a few decades. Now tell them the same thing: "The world you were born into no longer exists."
Except now it's not an emotional trigger, but a hopeful promise instead.
The way things are today - with all our broken systems, failed assumptions, and seemingly impossible problems - will no longer exist in the future. Because we're going to change it.
Doesn’t that sound crazy?
Sometimes it's genuinely hard to imagine change being possible. The inevitability of our current trajectory feels so permanent, so eternal. But all great empires fall. All systems evolve. Change is the only constant.
We didn't boot out our faxes, pagers and landlines because they stopped working or we got together en masse and protested against them. We designed, produced, and adopted mobile phones because the alternative was better than the status quo. The shift happened because people imagined a different future and teams of more people built towards it.
Ok, that’s a suuuper simplistic and reductive view on how change happens but it’s also just how all meaningful transformation works: not by fighting the old, but by building the new.
But survivorship bias is everywhere right now - and somehow only targeted towards the pessimistic. Bear with me on this bit…
We exist surrounded by things that succeeded in changing from one thing to another - at times that gives the sense that their existence was inevitable. But success isn't standard practice. Morbid as it is, just take a walk through any graveyard to be reminded of that. Creations fail. Companies fail. Ideas fail constantly.
Now think about how we discuss the big boys, Google, Meta etc.: enormous companies with seemingly unlimited budgets failing to build alternative worlds (Google Glass, Metaverse) compelling enough for mass adoption. Why? Throwing money at change doesn't guarantee transformation.
Actually, that's the wrong question entirely. The better question is: why are we so convinced that these companies can only succeed while smaller, slower or alternative initiatives must be doomed to fail? Applying our survivorship bias to Tech Titans and imagining ourselves already dead and buried in that failure graveyard as the default setting. Why do we assume their eternal dominance is inevitable and it's worthless even trying to imagine alternatives?
We're at a pivotal point right now - on the precipice of a new world being born as the old one dies out. This world that we know today will no longer exist, whether we actively shape that change or passively let it happen to us.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead
It's pointless getting stuck aestheticising decline when we have agency to create the future we want. Predictions are just that: predictions, not facts. Trends are signals, not inevitabilities. The real question for all of us isn't whether change will happen or not, but how we’ll be part of designing, building or buying into it.
What aspects of our present world do you want to no longer exist in the decades to come? What alternative can you build towards? What needs to be true today to create that future?
The world babies are born into twenty years from now will be radically different from today. The only question is whether it'll be better.
And that’s up to us.