Mordor to the Long Repair: How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades? | How to Think About the Future Part 4, Frankly 148

[instrumental music] Okay, mathematically, four grids with four quadrants each would give us two hundred and fifty-six possible combinations.

Of course, I'm not going to build two hundred and fifty-six worlds in this video, uh, or ever.

Uh, instead, I will highlight four here that are representative.

But before we get to that, some context.

First of all, these four futures are not equally likely.

The economy, in my opinion, is not a coin flip between growth and contraction going forward, especially as the years and decades go on.

Energy limits, resource depletion, too much debt, and ecological overshoot will all pull toward the contraction side, which is one of the core tenets of this platform.

The great simplification is an economic simplification.

We can still get regional growth or growth in some sectors or growth for a while or growth in things that are not physical, but steady material physical growth for the whole world year after year runs into walls that most big institutions and governments are not remotely anticipating, nor are the markets pricing in.

So these four worlds lean towards contraction, not because I want contraction, but because the physics and the ecology point that way.

You will notice that I do not build a green growth world, the one where we keep growing and heal the biosphere at the same time.

Those two pull against each other too hard for that combination to hold at a global scale.

And on the Earth system, we do not start from neutral.

We have already loaded the atmosphere, uh, and the oceans and eroded Earth's carrying capacity, and a strained but workable biosphere is the best realistic case here, and a badly degraded one is now also on the table.

Second, these grids are not independent.

They interact with and pull on each other.

For example, when resources get tight and the world outside looks hostile, governments tend to consolidate, and then power concentrates, and people go along with this because they're afraid, and this has been the historical default.

You can keep power broadly shared during hard times, but it takes unusual leadership and a lot of social trust, and that's the path that we hope for.

It just isn't the path of least resistance.

Steady growth needs at least somewhat cooperative geopolitics because global just-in-time supply chains need a functioning, uh, peaceful, for the most part, international order.

And growth under what I referred to as the geopolitical danger zone, uh, in part two is very hard to sustain, as the Iran situation is showing us in real-time slow motion.

And severe Earth system stress slowly eats away at our ability to govern human systems because constant crisis response burns through budgets, institutions, patients, and maybe most of all, any hopeful collective visions of the future.

So these worlds have their own internal pull.

Some combinations are stable, some are not, and will slide into something else, and some will take extraordinary effort to hold in place.

One last thing before we dive into scenarios.