Half An Hour of Future
When there’s Too Much Future, try reducing it to Half an Hour.
In Too Much Future I argued that we are living downstream of something I call Big Futurity, an increasingly industrialised system for producing forecasts, scenarios and authoritative accounts of what comes next. What it leaves behind is a peculiar imbalance. The system produces more and more futurity, and the self grows exhausted absorbing it.
Too Much Future, in the end, is saturation by the System and exhaustion of the Self.
Which raises the obvious question of what a counter-practice might look like. I don't think it is another forecast, or another grand vision. It may be something much smaller. Perhaps just half an hour of future.
Big Futurity and the exhausted self
Big Futurity can imagine at industrial scale. It has data, models, research departments, AI systems and institutional authority behind it. The individual has considerably less. And yet every future has to be lived by a self. The future of AI eventually becomes somebody's job, and the future of health somebody's body. The future of cities becomes somebody's neighbourhood, the future of surveillance somebody's freedom, and the future of work somebody's Tuesday morning.
That is the asymmetry. We are continually invited to contemplate enormous systemic futures while our own imaginative space quietly shrinks. There can be an excess of declared possibilities and a deficit of personally imagined possibilities. So perhaps the response to Big Futurity is not yet another attempt to tell people what happens next, but a small space in which the self can re-enter the future.
System & Self
That is increasingly how I understand System & Self. I see it less as a forecasting tool and more as a counter-practice. Its starting proposition is simple: every future is written between the system and the self. The system gives us the conditions through its technologies, institutions and markets. The self brings memory, judgement and imagination, and with them some measure of agency.
Neither is sufficient on its own. The future happens in the relationship between them.
So where Big Futurity begins with what happens next, System & Self begins with what is happening between the system and the self right now. What is acting upon me? What am I accepting, what am I resisting, and what am I slowly becoming accustomed to? What still feels open, and what do I want to protect?
These questions don't deny the system. The system is half the method. But they refuse to let it occupy the entire imaginative field. The self gets a place at the table too.
Thinking with your hands
That is why I turned System & Self into a physical deck.
One card brings something from the system onto the table and another brings something from the self. You place them side by side and read the tension between them. There is no prediction, no correct answer and no requirement to resolve uncertainty. What the cards create is an encounter. Sometimes that is a contradiction, sometimes a relationship you hadn't noticed before. The Jokers disturb the interpretation again, asking what happens if what was hidden becomes visible, or if everyone simply assumes this is normal. Nothing settles too quickly, and that is deliberate.
Less prediction, more encounter.
The aim is to reopen personal possibility rather than close the future down, and so the questions the cards prompt are personal ones.
What does this make me notice? What had I mistaken for inevitable? Where does my agency remain?
Closer to poetry
I have sometimes described the cards as closer to poetry than forecasting, and the longer I use them the more I think that's right. A poem rarely gives you the answer. It places things beside one another, an image here, a gap there, and meaning arises in the space between them.
System & Self works in a similar way. Often the important thing is the in-between.
Big Futurity tends to declare. This will happen, that will change, here is the future. The cards make room for a different vocabulary altogether, one made of maybes and what-ifs, of "I hadn't seen that before" and "that bothers me" and "I want to keep this". Those are not weak responses. They are signs that the self has re-entered the conversation.
Half an hour of future
So I have started making this a weekly practice.
Once a week I sit down with the cards for roughly half an hour. Two cards, sometimes a Joker, and one relationship to examine. It doesn't tell me what happens next week, which is precisely the point.
For half an hour Big Futurity stops. Nobody tells me what AI will inevitably do, nobody hands me another 2040 or another exponential curve, and nobody tells me which future I need to prepare for. I take one small part of the system and one small part of the self and ask what happens between them.
It is a deliberately different habit, one that puts reflection before prediction and authorship before inevitability. That matters because habits of attention shape what becomes visible. If Big Futurity keeps pulling our attention towards large, externally authored accounts of tomorrow, then we need an opposing habit, one that returns us again and again to the relationship between external conditions and lived experience.
The personal is not all that matters.
It is simply what has gone missing from the frame.
Personal futurity
The opposite of Big Futurity is not small futures. I think it is personal futurity, restoring the self to a future it has steadily been written out of. That doesn't mean treating the future as a vision board. Systems are real, power is real, and events exceed our control.
Agency is not control.
It is the capacity to notice what is happening, decide what matters and choose how to respond within the conditions we find ourselves in. A kind of authorship within the system.
You may not be able to rewrite the whole environment, but you can still decide what you accept, what you refuse and what you protect. Those decisions matter, because the future is not only made in laboratories, boardrooms and investment committees. It is also made through millions of smaller negotiations between systems and selves.
Making time
Perhaps that is what half an hour of future is really for.
It won't produce another future. It creates some space around the ones already crowding us. Appetite requires absence, and if we are constantly consuming somebody else's tomorrow there is very little room left to discover what we might want for ourselves.
So for half an hour, stop consuming the future.
Put the system on the table and the self beside it, and see what appears between them.
It won't be a prediction or an answer. It will be a possibility, an encounter, a small exercise of agency.
Every future has to be lived by a self.
Perhaps once a week we should give that self half an hour to think about it.