Factors for Future Professions

Factors for Future Professions

I write about the future because I believe in the future or more specifically I believe in Man and our ability to resolve. The reason I so believe is that I have a form of empathy that allows me to feel the collective hearts of Man and he is worthy of our confidence. Even the most evil of us want only to participate. I can feel their collective cry “Don’t leave me out! I want to be part of this.”

Through all the broken hearts, through all the invalidated ambitions, through all the corroded dreams, Man persists and resolves and becomes a greater thing—actually, the greatest thing.

Sure it may seem that we focus addictively on all of society’s broken bits but that, too, is why I have such confidence in our future. Humanity’s courage to jump right in to the fray and wrestle it into submission time after time with wound upon wound is the valiant brilliance that is US.

That characteristic exposes the poetry in our problems.

This is why I believe we have a future and why it will be spectacular.

Other future facilitating factors I predict are these…

By 2045 personal robots and intelligent devices will take most of the tedium and risk off our plates and fantastic pills will be available for entertainment and illness elimination.

We will have new vehicles to transport us to new places. Elon Musk will put us on different planets and a couple of new drone technologies under development (power supplies and propulsors) will put us physically or virtually into all the unvisited corners of the Earth, including jungles and ocean bottoms. Twenty foot fences and walls will be humorously naive relics as will signs that say KEEP OUT.

I fully expect a guaranteed annual income program to be instituted most everywhere. The studies and pilots don’t lie and the social benefits are both undeniable and spectacular.

However, as we already know, a bunch of people with a lot of time on their hands can make life hell for everyone else, particularly politicians and social facilitators. Which leads us to the question of what will we do to make our daily contributions to society, something we absolutely need to do to maintain a healthy sense of self?

I expect that we will still be finding ourselves or at least our identities in other people much like we do now. We will study our iconic pioneers and emulate and further their original aspirations. Nicola Tesla, Bob Dylan, Ben Franklin, Marylin Monroe, Art Garfunkel… is there an end to this list? It’s free passion and grace. What’s not to crave?

And we will study. This will be our primary cure for boredom. Permanent full-time students, thats what we’ll be. And what with a 2050 life expectancy of in excess of 200 years, we will know and be able to do everything. Imagine being a mathematician-poet-ninja or the popular physicist-philosopher-stunt pilot or like the fellow in the photo above, a carpenter-entertainer-matchmaker. Oh, the places we’ll go.

And the people we’ll meet. Social and gentle-person skills will be reborn after we rediscover the value of actual (as opposed to virtual) friends and family.  We will dance and debate, build and create, soar to new levels of generosity. We will rediscover playing and art, music and heart and endlessly trying to impress those whose attention we seek.

With advancing technology, observing, recording, deducing, and publishing everything, everywhere will mean corruption and general bad behavior should be a “relegated to the past.” A huge citizen paparazzi will prize discovering evidence of corruption and toxic behaviors.

I expect we will all be a lot less judgmental due to having seen everything being done by everyone particularly by those we are fond of. When everything is “normal,” the old judgers just let it go and learn to graciously accommodate those on a different or learning path.

While writing this I had the strangest sense that someone else had said all this before so I did a search to avoid plagiarism and it turns out that someone kinda had. Take a few seconds to read Oh, the places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss. It turns out that its his birthday today (March 2 1904) and he timelessly describes who we are and how we’ll fare in the future most eloquently…

 

“You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself

any direction you choose.

You’re on your own. And you know what you know.

And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”