Worldview shift

The era and culture of modernity is being swept away and a new civilization is emerging. A radically different worldview is taking shape and the ability to make sense of it is the key to navigating what comes next.

The world is now primed for a transformation in every aspect of life. This is the start of a new era, arising organically from evolutionary developments at multiple levels of reality. Following the global system shock of 2020-2021, the entire power structure and worldview of modernity, which was in terminal decline, is now breaking down. The infrastructure for a replacement system is already coming into being, well below the radar of traditional news reporting. The challenge facing us all now is to be aware of, be open to, and actively engage with the radical potential for human freedom that is becoming possible as the transition unfolds.

The aim of this website is simply to assemble in one place the diversity of ideas and insights that together weave a sense of the emerging future. Hopefully this will assist in making sense of the potentially disorientating transformation that is underway, for preparing psychologically and practically, and for seeing how to participate creatively in the changes that are now unfolding.

The future

The future we now face is very far from the future as usual. It is going to involve a total societal transformation. Many outmoded things will be swept away, even as we enter an extraordinary time ‘of miracles and wonder’.

Pictures of the future tend to suffer from the hazard of audience disbelief – what 1970s scenario planners called the Cassandra Effect. In Greek myth, Cassandra was engaged to the god Apollo, and he gave her the gift of knowing the future. When she jilted him, instead of taking back his gift, he simply added a rider: that no one would believe her. So, during the siege of Troy when she attempted to warn the Trojans against bringing the wooden horse inside the city, she was ignored – with consequences that went down in history.

This then is the dilemma: it is possible to discover a great deal about the future simply by seriously studying the leading edge of the present, but the difficulty is to get anyone to believe it. A deep-seated reluctance to consider futures shaped by new values or new assumptions is a particular source of resistance. And yet these are precisely the conditions that can deliver a future that is better than the present, as hard as that may be to believe.

Inspiring hope

The timeline presented here is an overview of what appears to be the most probable big-picture future. It is based on several decades of my experience and research as a professional futurist.

This site is not intended as a source of rapidly changing news. It aims at gradually building a big picture of what is coming into view, starting with an initial sketch and progressively adding detail.

The future cannot be fully known by prediction, because it can always be expanded by creativity. The door may be opening to the path ahead, but it is up to us to actually bring our future world into being, to forge our new culture and our new place in the universe.

All the ideas presented here can be detected in the shifts of perspective occurring today. Research into the future involves gathering and assembling insights from every aspect of our existing culture – ranging through science, art, philosophy, religion, politics, sociology, futurism, and the esoteric.

Showing how these changes all connect can offer a general direction for progress, a conceptual framework for an optimistic future. My hope is that it can inspire new thinking and align potential action. It is a provocation, a casting of seeds for the future.