I am most commonly known for my work as a thinker and writer. Others took it upon themselves to label me a futurist - considered by many to be a far more legitimate profession. Apart from connecting the dots that others missed, on more than a few occasions, I am not sure what I did to deserve such a curse. Sometimes I feel like a latter-day Cassandra, accurately describing how events could unfold, should present patterns persist, but ignored by many and even mocked by a few.
A human life can be described as that "brief moment" of consciousness between birth and death. In point of fact our perceptual acuity is so captive to illusion and myth that most of us are barely awake. Perspective also counts of course. Walking in the slums of Orangi Township in Karachi is not the same as shopping on Fifth Avenue. One's perception of reality is intensely different in both instances.
None the less, if we could prolong that "brief moment" long enough to cut through all the distractions, ambient noise, and contradictory perspectives, perhaps we would open our minds long enough to see things differently. We might even become less perceptually myopic - able to embrace new epistemes without fear.
Some scientists, like Ray Kurzweil for example, are eagerly trying to extend that "brief moment" by prolonging life itself. Yesterday I was young. Today I am just a grumpy old man. But what then? Tomorrow I may choose to upload my mind onto a digital medium, before my physical body totally decays, so that anyone who so desires can experience my personal story in vivid detail - assuming their curiosity can overcome any morbid voyeuristic concerns of course.
I wonder if the future really will be like that? At my advancing age such speculation is immaterial. In any case I believe understanding the present in terms of the past is more important than tripping out on a future we cannot be certain about until it morphs into being. I am vexed, you see, not by the fact that the future is an illusion, but that the present passes so quickly.
So, let us turn our attention to the present. It is a cliché that we live in an era of unprecedented disruption. Uncertainty, volatility, ambiguity and complexity prevail. But have you wondered why? I mean really considered why? I usually try to explain the pressure we are all feeling as an inevitable consequence of the transition between industrial models, treaties and practices that have stopped working, and a potentially new phase of human development.
We experience this transition as a tsunami of previously unthinkable and unpredictable events. It is tempting to point to machine intelligence, social unrest, genocide in Palestine, Ukraine, intensifying civil disobedience, the US-China trade rivalry, religious fundamentalism of all kinds, or even Donald Trump, as the major cause for our discomfort. But it is actually more fundamental than that. For this is a crisis of consciousness - a breakdown in our appreciation of what it means to be human amidst the mindless prolongation of the cycle of desire and consumption that has become central to how modern society works.
The desires of around 8 billion people all wanting more and more stuff and a better quality of life puts untold stresses on many of our most life-critical systems. As they were not designed to cope with such sheer numbers they begin to fail. Our innate competitive response opens up wide cultural divisions and social rifts. We blame those who are not like us, or billionaires, or politicians, for our problems. When that only makes matters worse we grasp that as individuals we have no power to change the course of events. We succumb to increased levels of despair, depression, and a range of other mental health problems. Suicide rates climb. Feeling anxious and cynical, we resort to buying more and more stuff in the expectation this will make us happy - for that is what we have consistently been told. But materialism fails yet again. The cycle is perpetuated, but the despair just deepens.
There are at least four factors amplifying the levels of discomfort we are feeling, and they reinforce each other:
1.    The doctrine of assumptions and beliefs we share (our materialistic worldview) has become infused with a moral impulse based on monetizing literally anything that moves - from the forests and the oceans to the air we breathe. This manifests as a world-system driven by the growth of greed and envy.
2.    Many new business models, largely the product of predatory capitalism, where the usual tensions between capital and labour have been replaced by frictions between the observers and the observed, are divisive. Most obviously revealed in organisations like Facebook, for example, these models are purposely formulated to generate revenues from fear and outrage.
3.    As little more than innovative apes, our cognitive capacity hovers just below the threshold needed to solve the existential problems we ourselves created. At the same time, we have invented a machine intelligence that is fast outstripping our own ability to think. Our inability to take appropriate action leaves us stranded in an even more vulnerable limbo.
4.    Innovations of every description, from radical ideas and AI-enabled processes, to ground-breaking industries and products, are captured by the owners of capital, repackaged, and shoehorned into the current world-system of industrial economism. Value is measured in terms of monetary gain and real advancement remains an illusion.
Because of all the confusion, misinformation, and conflicting power plays, we find ourselves stranded between the plutocratic status quo - with its unhealthy and unsustainable addiction to business-as-usual - and a world of open cooperation where knowledge applied empathically could potentially be used to effect regenerative, second-order change, at scale, ultimately resolving most of the problems those adhering to the status quo choose to ignore, or pray will go away.
The undetected pattern that makes most sense in this context arises from the effects of a distinctive metaphysical framework - a design ontology that enabled the industrial revolution to gain traction and brought many of us wealth beyond our wildest dreams. This framework - encompassing Occidental cosmology, scientific realism, Cartesian logic and, more recently, neoliberal political and economic theory - has now totally subsumed most other cultural mindsets.
Dominant in today's world it influences how we think, how we interpret events, how we shape our relationships with each other (and with the planet), how we bring a sense of orderliness to our affairs, and how we take, or avoid taking, action. But there is a problem which few people are discussing. Unseen, or brushed aside, this ontology has become cancerous. Infecting our shared worldview with its toxicity, the world-system it generates, and which we take for granted, has started to collapse.
When both markets and governments fail to provide for the needs of society, it is hardly surprising we are feeling so overwhelmed by the chaos in our lives. Unfortunately, we do not easily accept the idea of extinction. Like the problem we have accepting the climate crisis, we will not believe our society is in a state of collapse until the evidence is overwhelming and can no longer be denied. The real issue is what we should be doing about it of course.