Tomorrow is my Birthday, and since I’ve become a parent a few years ago, it has turned into a moment of reflection. And I find myself asking the same question:
What year will it be when my kids are my age?
Currently the answer is 02070.
That number somehow sounds wildly futuristic.
And given what I’ve learned over the last few year about where our world is heading, it also sounds frightening.
A lot of reports related to climate and projections only go to 02050.
What will the world in 02070 look like?
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty freaked out by that question.
And I don’t know whether I’ll be blessed with a life long enough to experience it. Yet, it does not matter, because I surely hope my children will. And by then, they might have children themselves.
Assuming that is the case, what year will it be when they reach my age?
That will likely be beyond 02100.
Observed (1900–2020) and projected (2021–2100) changes in global surface temperature (relative to 1850–1900), which are linked to changes in climate conditions and impacts, illustrate how the climate has already changed and will change along the lifespan of three representative generations (born in 1950, 1980 and 2020). From: IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers.
The current default path is unfortunately in those darker shades, as we’re seeing emissions and other critical measure still rise steeply, in what the Stockholm Resilience Center calls the Great Acceleration in its Planetary Health Check.
And by now, you may be wondering: what’s with the “0” in front of the years?
It’s not a typo. It’s a simple practice to help us think more long-term.
2070 or 2100 may sound far into the future. And yet, it’s not even a century.
A very short time if we detach ourselves from our individual time, and think of the bigger picture. I’m not even talking about cosmic timelines. Take humanity for example.
If we arbitrarily take our current time as the midpoint between when humans first appeared and when we’ll disappear, that is a time-span of 300,000 BC until 300,000 AD. And now is 002,026 AD.
I learned that mental trick recently from Roman Krznaric, as I was reading his excellent book: The Good Ancestor.
Subtitled: How to think long term in a short-term world.
In the book he lists Six Ways to Think Long:
Deep-Time Humility
Legacy Mindset
Intergenerational Justice
Cathedral Thinking
Holistic Forecasting
Transcendent Goal
I urge everyone to read the book, no matter whether you have kids yourself or not. After all we’re all connected, or in the words of Roman:
“We are just a tiny link in the great chain of living organisms, so who are we to put it all in jeopardy with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies ? Don’t we have an obligation, a responsibility, to our planetary future and the generations of humans and other species to come?
[…] We live in an interdependent world, our actions having consequences not just for our neighbours or people in distant lands, but for the generations to come.”
Which he pointedly summarizes in the ‘Golden Baton’ metaphor, applying the Golden rule across time, i.e.
‘Do unto future generations as you would have past generations do unto you.’
I viscerally felt that Deep-Time Humility, not least because I had just read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, which served as stark reminder how unlikely our existence is.
As a species, and as individuals. Each and every single one of us.
It is truly mind-boggling.
We can’t even grasp the vastness of the universe in both space and time. The likelihood that a planet like ours would emerge from the tremendous chaos of billions of years of cosmic history is just infinitesimal.
And that you, exactly you, would be picked from billions of sperms, all dependent on billions of sperms before your father’s across hundreds of generations, and the odds of all these men meeting their respective women. I mean, you can’t even start doing the math.
One of Bill Bryson’s genius is his ability to make all those enormously big and incredibly small numbers somehow comprehensible.
And Roman doesn’t ask us to even to think at that scale. Just that we expand our thinking from quarters to years. From years to decades. From decades to centuries. The so-called Cathedral Thinking.
Relating to the idea that we’re building something we will never see the end of.
Nate Hagens talks about changing the initial conditions for the future. Moving away from the “default path”, which will end our civilization and species much earlier than 300,000 years from now.
The Bern Minster in my hometown. Construction started in 1421, and the tower stading 100m tall, was only completed in its current shape in 1893. (Photo: Philippe Arnez)
So what will our Legacy be?
When I opened the book, there was this quote, which immediately made me felt seen.
It’s 3:23 in the morning and I can’t sleep because my great great grandchildren ask me in dream what did you do while the earth was unravelling?
— Drew Dellinger
So, I’m working on my Legacy Mindset every day. How can I make sure my children, and their children will be proud of what grandpa did, to contribute to a future worth living in for them?
It often feels like an insurmountable task, and yet it’s the only thing that matters.
It’s about Intergenerational Justice.
Yet, we’re overshooting our planet and doing exactly the opposite: Intergenerational Injustice.
Rather than being guardians of the planet for generations to come, we’re depleting it.
Last year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 24th. And it’s getting closer every year.
Where I live, in Finland, Overshoot Day was actually already on April 1st (Oh, how I wish it was a joke). And yet, somehow we still turnout at the top of the World Happiness Report.
Sadly, the report does not consider that context, yet another display of disconnect from our biophysical realities and the real cost of the system as my friend Ralph Thurm observed.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that we’ve crossed 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries.
Yet, I’m not a Doomer. I don’t want to be. That won’t help my kids.
Which brings me to the third book in the initial picture: Breaking Together.
The book’s content would fill many blog posts, but the concept I want to bring in is the one of the Doomster, which Jem Bendell desribes as:
“[…] letting go of identities and illusions tied to industrial consumerism, allowing space for intuition, creativity, and renewal. Time is needed for this personal disintegration and reconstitution, but it can open doors to deeper meaning.
[…] a “doomster agenda” that embraces collapse not as failure but as an opportunity for transformation. Positive policy agendas are possible – such as supporting local resilience, dismantling harmful subsidies, and protecting freedoms – but they must be grounded in acceptance of overall contraction of resource consumption.
This ties back to the Holistic Forecasting.
We still shape our future, the question is what do we envision? What are we working towards?
The weight is real. Yet, we have to free ourselves from the numbness.
The other front page quote can guide us:
The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
— Jonas Salk
Which has become my guiding question. It’s the reason I’m doing what I’m doing.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that what I care deeply about is a future where humans and planet flourish. Together, not one at the expense of the other.
We are part of this planet, completely dependent from it. Not the other way around.
If it’s not healthy, we can’t be.
That is the Transcendent Goal which had already found me before I ever picked up the book.
Thanks for reading. I'm Philippe Arnez is a Certified Positive Psychology and Flow Coach, Founder of Culture4Flow, and fractional Chief Flourishing Officer (CFLO). I help leaders and organizations move toward genuine flourishing — through workshop facilitation, flow coaching, and culture companionship. 🌱
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