Too Much Future

Overfed on other people’s futures, starved of our own

I had been turning the phrase over for months before I tried it out on Sherry Turkle in our conversation for Me:chine Dialogues on The Future of You.

Too Much Future.

She laughed, said she loved it, and joked that it might be her new bumper sticker.

This essay is my attempt to set down properly what I mean by it.

Hardly a day passes without another prediction about AI, or work, or democracy, or the climate, or war. Another outlook, another trends report, another conference devoted to the future of something, each one inviting us to prepare for what happens next. We have become extraordinarily good at producing futurity. And yet I have started to wonder whether all this attention to the future leaves us feeling any more capable of shaping it. I suspect it may be doing the opposite. Institutions cannot seem to get enough future, while many of us as individuals have already had more than we can digest. We haven't lost our appetite. We've been overfed.

We are bingeing on predictions and starving for possibility.

Big Futurity

Too Much Future describes the experience of being on the end of this futurity force-feeding. So much so that I have come to call the cause, Big Futurity: the industrial-scale production and circulation of authoritative accounts of what comes next. Big Futurity means ‘foresight’ produced at industrial scale. Too Much Future is what it feels like to live downstream of it.

We already speak of Big Tech and Big Pharma, meaning systems rather than single organisations, whose scale gives them unusual power over the environments the rest of us live in. Something similar has happened to the future. Technology companies, consultancies, governments, investors, think tanks and media organisations now have an enormous capacity to describe tomorrow, backed by data, models, scenario teams, AI, institutional authority and money. They can imagine at industrial scale, and what they produce has become a product in its own right. Reports, forecasts, keynotes and transformation programmes are packaged as predictions or even as assumptions, and circulated and consumed. Plenty of it is serious and useful foresight. But the sheer accumulated volume surrounding us is no accident. There is now an economy built on telling people what comes next.

Everyone has a future to sell

That economy thrives because the future is so useful in the present. A technology company describing an AI-mediated future is often merely describing the market it hopes to create. A consultancy's future of work tends to generate demand for transformation, an investor's emerging industry draws in capital, and a government's future threat builds support for action. None of that makes these futures dishonest. It simply means that futurity does things today. And many futures are feeling less like invitations to imagine and more like bids for attention, investment or consent.

This is why "the future of…" has become so ubiquitous. Sometimes it introduces genuine futures work. But just as often it introduces a product launch, an investment thesis or a public relations campaign. The word itself has become a rhetorical intensifier. Attach it to almost anything and the proposition acquires importance, novelty and a faint air of inevitability. I note that my hatred of the event title “The Future is Now” seems to grow in direct proportion to its use. It feels like even the six-letter word ‘future’ has been overfed to us.

Possible, probable, inevitable

That would matter less if these claims on the future stayed labelled as claims. But as they circulate, possibility takes on the texture of probability, probability then borrows the authority of prediction, and prediction starts to sound like fate. A prototype becomes the future of work. A corporate ambition becomes where the industry is heading. "This could happen" and "we would like this to happen" collapse into the inevitable "this will happen".

Which leaves us with a peculiar paradox. We may never have been shown so many possible futures, and yet the future feels increasingly predetermined.

There can be an excess of declared possibilities whilst at the same time a deficit of personally imagined possibilities.

We are surrounded by possibility, most of it being imagined for us.

The future used to taste better

There have always been frightening futures. The twentieth century had nuclear annihilation, ecological collapse and machine domination to contend with. But alongside them ran another register, one in which the future simply meant more: more mobility, more leisure, more places to go and more people we might become. Those visions were rarely realistic or politically innocent, but they carried a feeling of expansion and self-actualisation.

Much of what arrives now carries the opposite. Less privacy, fewer secure jobs, more surveillance, more synthetic media, more pressure to adapt. The future presents itself less as somewhere we might go and more as something we must brace ourselves to withstand. "Imagine what might become possible" is a very different invitation from "here are another twelve disruptions to prepare for". Thinking about the future is now a lot less enjoyable and often feels burdensome, like homework.

The present is using up the future

Imagining genuine alternatives is demanding work. It asks us to loosen our grip on the present, tolerate uncertainty and ask what if? without immediately demanding which one?

That takes cognitive surplus, and the problem is - the present is consuming most of it. People are trying to understand AI while doing their jobs, absorbing economic pressure, living under constant threat of street crime, a foreboding about military conscription, and an anxiousness thanks to the relentless information overload, all in real time. Then somebody arrives with another report about 2040. And even after decades of thinking about the future for a living there are weeks when one more forecast feels like a weight rather than an invitation.

The present is becoming so demanding that it is consuming the cognitive surplus required to imagine alternative futures.

The very conditions that make foresight necessary make the posture it requires harder to sustain. When the immediate environment gets this demanding, the horizon contracts and the urgent displaces the imaginable. The system says we need more foresight. The individual says please, not another thing to worry about. That is the moment Big Futurity becomes Too Much Future: the system keeps producing futurity precisely as the self loses the capacity to absorb it.

We are saturated with someone else’s futures and exhausted in the making of our own.

Big futures, small lives

There is another imbalance here. Institutional futures keep getting bigger: artificial general intelligence, synthetic biology, civilisational transformation. Personal horizons, meanwhile, have grown strangely modest. Can I keep my job? Can I afford my home? Can I still make this decision for myself?

The collective future grows as the personal one shrinks, and I think that is part of why so much contemporary futurity feels alien. These are futures for us. They rarely feel like futures of ours.

Yet every vast systemic future has to land somewhere. A job changes, a technology enters the home, something once unacceptable at some point becomes normal. Every future has to be lived by a self, and that is exactly what Big Futurity overlooks.

Just give me the answer

Perhaps this explains something I notice more and more. People want the answer. Which jobs survive, which technology wins, which scenario actually happens. Just tell me. I understand the desire, because uncertainty is exhausting. But foresight was never meant to abolish uncertainty. Part of its value lies in creating a space where several futures can coexist. Once possibility itself feels overwhelming though, exploration can become just one more burden, and a perverse incentive follows: the more uncertain the world becomes, the bigger the market for people who sound certain about it.

System & Self

So I don't believe the answer is better and bigger future certainties. What Big Futurity has pushed out of the frame is the self, and that is what my own work keeps returning to.

Every future is written between the system and the self. That is both my personal futures philosophy and the position behind Futuremade.

The System sets the conditions around us through technologies, institutions and markets. The Self meets those conditions through memory, judgement and imagination. Neither makes the future alone. The future emerges in the relationship between them.

Big Futurity makes ‘System’ overwhelmingly visible. It wants to know what AI will do, what markets will do, what governments will do. Wheras, my System & Self framework asks a different kind of question.

What is the system asking of me?

What am I quietly getting used to?

What had I assumed was inevitable, and what do I still want?

Agency here doesn't mean controlling the whole future. None of us can. It means keeping some capacity to notice what is happening, decide what matters and choose how to respond. Or choose not to respond. But at least, choose.

It’s a form of authorship within the system.

Possibilities, not predictions

That is also why I made System & Self physical.

The deck holds cards about the system and cards about the self, and you place one beside another and read the tension or revelation between them. There is no prediction, no correct answer, no claim about 2040.

What you get instead is an encounter: sometimes a contradiction, sometimes something you hadn't noticed before. The aim is to open possibility back up rather than narrow the future down to an answer.

Less prediction, more encounter.

In that sense the cards are closer to poetry than forecasting. A poem rarely tells you what to conclude. It sets things beside one another and lets meaning arise in the space between.

Big Futurity declares: this will happen, here is the trajectory.

System & Self asks what you notice, what you want to keep, and where your agency might still reside.

Recreating the appetite

Which brings me back to appetite. The challenge, as I see it, is to create some space between all these futures, rather than manufacture another one or make every one of them cheerful.

Appetite needs absence.

To want something we have to be allowed to miss it, and Big Futurity gives us almost no distance from tomorrow.

Forecast follows report follows keynote follows scenario, until tomorrow becomes a wall of noise inside today. People may be losing their appetite for the future not because they lack imagination, but because they are never far enough from it to want it. We are being force-fed other people's futures: “Too Much Future”

What we need is some temporal breathing space. Enough distance to tell a forecast from a sales pitch, and somebody else's preferred future from our own sense of what is possible. Being informed about the future is not the same as feeling capable of making one.

The future isn't now.

But the future is being made now.

That distinction matters, because the first collapses the horizon while the other returns us to agency.

Perhaps the opposite of Big Futurity isn't small futures at all. It is personal futurity, a way of restoring the self to a future it has steadily been written out of.

And perhaps the answer to Too Much Future is not to feed the self yet another future.

It is to give it enough room to become hungry again.