Imaginable by Jane McGonigal

The author talks about running a simulation called Superstruct in 2008 where she was able to predict several things that actually happened during the Coronavirus pandemic a decade later.

“In dealing with the future … it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent ‘right’.”.

The real point is not about being able to predict the future accurately, instead it is about becoming better at adapting when the future we imagined changes in unexpected ways.

Good news is that it is possible to train your mind to be more open in imagining an alternate future and then preparing as time reveals it.

When we are trained to expect the unexpected then we act faster and are more adaptable. A superpower in a sense.

Imagining a future vividly actually creates memories that your mind recognises if that future actually plays out.

This means you do not freak out and instead are more level-headed.

Being able to prepare your mind to adapt to unexpected change faster, to build resilience, and a sense of hope and optimism in the face of unfamiliar times.

Mindset step 1 involves “rethinking and reinventing“, that is, imagining futures that are dramatically different than what you till date have been expecting to happen.

Mindset step 2 is to balance the two directions our imagination takes when faced with a novel situation – real or imagined: Admittedly most of us usually spend most time on the second point.

Mindset step 3 is about looking for actionable ways to influence the future and make it more manageable.

Positive imagination: Imagining all the good and positive that could come out of a situation.

Shadow imagination: Imagining all the bad that could come out of the

Important to focus on the details here and define exactly what good or bad you think is going to happen.

This transforms our worries (and hopes) about the future from an amorphous blob to something concrete, and when that happens you can address the specific problems head on “… seeing risks more clearly and defining your worries more concretely can actually help you feel more hopeful.“.

All three of these mindset steps will combine to give a person (you) “urgent optimism“.

“Urgent optimism means you’re not staying awake all night worrying about what might happen. Instead, you’re leaping out of bed in the morning with a fire in your pants to do something about it. Urgent optimism is knowing that you have agency and the ability to use your unique talents, skills, and life experiences to create the world you want to live in.“

Think ten years out: The author has seen that a timeline ten years out in the future helps people “unstick” their minds and think more broadly.

They are willing to consider the possibility of profound change occurring during the period and are more hopeful in their approach to it. “… time spaciousness. It’s the relaxing and empowering feeling that we have enough time to do what really matters—to consider our options, make a plan, and act more confidently to create the future we want.“.

Do it with others: You’ll get perspective on how they think about the same subjects.

Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) is when you try to vividly imagine a future; not just its dry facts (“it’s going to rain tomorrow”) but the actual feelings and emotions as if you’re already there (“the rain will bring out the petrichor and I will sit in my balcony with a warm cup of hot cocoa enjoying the cool breeze on my face”).

When you practice EFT for things expected to happen tomorrow or next week – your brain already knows the broad strokes of what will happen, so it’s not imagining as much as it is forecasting basis the past days and weeks you’ve already been through.

But when you practice EFT ten years out, your brain does not have anything to forecast – ten years is such a long time that anything can change in your life.

In absence of any past data, it starts from a clean slate unencumbered with any of the current challenges you face.

“Episodic Future Thinking is the central activity of preparing for ‘unthinkable’ events and planning for ‘unimaginable’ change—so I want you to get very good at it.“

“You wake up, 10 years from now…”:

• “… where do you wake up? What time is it? Are you alone or is someone with you? Are you in a room? What kind of a room is it? Look around the room, what do you see?”
• “… what activities are on your mind? What are the first things you do after waking up?”
• “… what activities are not on your mind?”
• “… what are you looking forward to? What are you not?”
• “… you look outside, what changes do you see?”

BTW, EFT also is a good tool in case you are hoping to change someone’s mind.

By asking them to vividly imagine the future they are resisting you are actually likely to make them more open to that future.

The alienness of the entire thing diminishes – “Any time a future possibility feels easy to imagine, the brain is more likely to file it away as a “normal” and likely event—even if it’s never happened before.“.

I think David McRaney might have found this technique useful when he was writing How Minds Change.

Because if the mind can imagine something in vivid and great detail (not just broad swathes) then it is akin to having actually lived through that imagined future that is then remembered as a memory of the past.

“A future scenario is a detailed description of a particular future you might wake up in, a future in which at least one thing is dramatically different from today.“

This has to be combined with EFT, where you first need to vividly imagine a day far out in the future (10 years from now) and then when you’re really feeling that future you need to introduce one or more ways that world is different from the one you inhabit today.

There’s no “right” way to think about these differences. Don’t completely suspend disbelief, but it is good to be creative with your imagination.

After finishing imagining your future scenario, examine it from various lenses and how you would deal with them.

Here are a few general examples though each future scenario should have its own specific ones as well.

Imagine “Ten years from now …”:

“… no one goes to jobs they hate because the government gives everyone decent universal basic income. If people work, they work because they love what they do.”

“… AI has automated and democratized most creative activity, hence people like to pay premium for ‘AI-free’ stuff like books written by an actual human writer, or music made by a real human band.”

“… with increased connectivity and mobility, people identify more as global citizens rather than belonging to a specific nation. From morning till evening, people log into their work with a virtual reality headset and work in virtual offices. On weekends the same VR technology allows people to experience different cultures and places from the comfort of their homes. Commuting for work is a thing of the past.”

“… 3D printing has revolutionized shopping as people just order/license 3D models of whatever they want and then print it at their homes with sophisticated multi-material 3D printers. Lately some companies are touting the final frontier of 3D printing – 3D printed food.”

“… urban areas have transformed into green, sustainable cities. Buildings are covered in vertical gardens that produce fresh vegetables and fruits. Rooftop beekeeping is common, and community gardens are everywhere. People take pride in contributing to the environment and living in harmony with nature.”

“… personalized healthcare is the norm. Everyone has a digital twin, an AI model that monitors their health in real-time, predicts potential health issues, and suggests preventive measures. Medical treatments are tailored to individual genetic profiles, leading to unprecedented levels of health and longevity.”

“… space agencies of all major economies proactively monitor space for expected asteroid collisions with Earth. Today they sighted an asteroid with a 10% chance of hitting your state in the next three years.”

“… propelled by a wave computational advances and technological progress, AI is able to provide real time emotional companionship. As a result, many people are deciding to forego traditional marriage or romantic relationships in favor of the AI relationship. Seperation and divorce rates skyrocket.”

“… no one denies climate change is real anymore. Every other week you hear about a climate event forcing ever more people to relocate in the thousands from their homes. So, called ‘safe cities’ have seen a massive influx of ‘climate refugees’ over the last year.”

• What would be your first reaction to this future? Would you love it or hate it?
• What new businesses would emerge in this future?
• What new jobs would be created?

• What old businesses would die out?
• Would you consider changing you career in this future?
• How would society and its values change in this future? How would your family values change?

Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.

At first you should laugh at it, and then you should go “hmmm”.

Purely fantastical statements are not what you’re looking for – there has to be some possibility of the future coming true, though prima facie the statement would look unimaginable.

“The more ridiculous an idea about the future seems to you, the more potentially useful it is to you—because it suggests the kind of change that will be hardest for you, personally, to see coming.”

The more you practice with ridiculous at first future scenarios, the better you get at generally being more open and adaptable to change and not getting paralyzed by it.

The author recommends a game called “Stump the Futurist” where one tries to come up with a statement about the future that you think the futurist cannot imagine, while the futurist will try to show you how a future like that may actually come to pass.

The “futurist” in this game may not be a real futurist but even just a friend or colleague playing the role of one. As the futurist, try to look for real trends and evidence that support the plausible future.

Examples: “ten years from now, it will still take a man and a woman to make a baby”, “ten years from now we’ll still be driving on roads”, “ten years from now we’ll still be using heat to cook food”.

Another game the author recommends is “One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future” where you pick a topic and list out as many facts that are generally true about it today, then you rewrite the opposite of each fact (don’t worry if the opposites don’t make sense), finally you try to come up with ideas and evidence as to how the opposite facts can come true.

This game is best played in a group.

And you can make it more interesting still: “Make a list of at least five things that are true about your life today. Then rewrite them so that the opposite is now true, or offer a strange new alternative”.

Whether it be a scenario imagined through the Stump the Futurist game or the One Hundred Ways game – The final step will always be going through the various lenses I mentioned earlier to analyze how you would behave and feel in the new future.

It means developing a new way of thinking and perceiving so that the strange things you normally would ignore, now you pay special attention to.

The author calls this “strangesight“, that is, a sight that is on the look out for things out of the ordinary, strange.

McGonigal posits that this is the precursor to foresight. I get it, because you first need to be able to look for unusual things to have a prediction about unexpected change.

It is indeed a skill to develop since it is the we’re usually, by default, avoiding or ignoring the unexpected (confirmation bias + normalcy bias), and it is the unexpected change that catches us off guard.

Specifically, you’re looking for “signals of change“, a concrete example of how the world could be different one day.

The scale of the change is not as important as its concreteness, that is, it should be a real change happening right now and not a hypothetical one that could potentially happen some day.

“You know you’ve found a signal if you can tell a story about it—a who, what, when, where, and why.“.

You can then check the scale of the change – is it something that is localised to your family or community?

Or is it something that other people in your city or country or even the world are noticing?

You can even turn the signal into a future scenario imagining a time where the signal is not the exception

“A future force is a significant trend or phenomenon that’s likely to make a disruptive or transformative impact on society.“

While you have to go out looking for signals of change, there’s no missing a future force – these are the trends that have snowballed into mega trends. But the snowballing takes time and future forces usually move slow and play out over many years.

For example, as of writing this, some future forces would be the rise of AI, urbanisation and increased global lifespan.

Future forces will have experts, in fact several of them, talking about it and rallying wide interest for its containment or propagation depending on if they think it’s a bad thing or a good one.

A good compendium of future forces is the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report, and Global Trends by the US National Intelligence Council.

The author encourages us to choose a few future forces (and even provides a list of them) that are most likely to affect our lives and those of one’s close to us, and start tracking them each year.

She guides that we should choose a few that feel like risks and a few that feel like opportunities.

Eventually, you can decide what to do about that (a signal of change or future force depending on what you’re working with) – ignore it, adapt to it, or gain from it.

Google “future of ______”, the blank should contain what ever you want to search for signals of change.

Plus, terms like “cutting-edge”, “innovation”, “new trend” can get you better results.

Ignore the general trends, like “AI”, robotics” and focus on the real stories of real humans, you’ll likely get these in news and magazine articles.

Block some time each week where you let your mind wander thinking about what unusual thing you’ve been noticing is actually a signal of change.

Start small: Forget about how the future would change the entire world and yours. Put aside the fact that you as an individual would have very little control over this future force. Instead, “… identify one thing you could do to help one person affected by this force …”. Action is the antidote to anxiety.

Freewrite: Take 5 minutes (not longer) and quickly write down whatever comes to your mind when you think about a future scenario.

Practice hard empathy: There are two kinds of empathy – easy and hard.

Easy is the one that comes naturally to you, because you have been through the same situation before and so it’s easy to feel empathy for someone who is going through it right now.

Hard empathy is where you’ve never been through a similar situation, so your mind has to work hard to generate empathy for the person. The reward, however, is that when you get good at hard empathy your relationships become more resilient and you recover from disagreements faster.

One way to practice hard empathy is by going to news or social media and reading a story about someone whose life (at least right now) is completely different than yours (here’s an example). Imagine yourself with the constraints and freedom of their life while still living the life you’re living (i.e. your own family, community, city and country). Trying to completely transport yourself to their life circumstances, community, culture and country is actually less effective than transporting their life circumstances into your community, culture and country.

Look for actionable ways to influence the future and find your own unique way to help: How? By pre-thinking and pre-feeling how you will help yourself and others adapt to a future scenario. The author recommends a game called “Pack Your Bags for the Future” where you think deeply about the following:

Skills and abilities: What are you good at? What do you know that other people do not?

Deep knowledge and passions: What topic or activity do you know a lot about, more than most people? What do you spend a lot of time thinking about, more than most people?

Communities: What communities are you a part of? What groups are you a member of?

Values: What are your core values?