TRANSCRIPT
That’s not a lot of time thinking about our future, the future of our planet, the future of our world, the future of our society, and the future of our species. What I’ve come up with is a lot of different ideas for what I think is going to happen in our future. So the date that I’m shooting for is 20 years in the future. What do I think is going to happen? Here are some of my predictions.
The first big one is people are going to wake up a lot more to the absolute horror that our species has perpetrated on this planet. The destruction we’ve done to nature, the destruction we’ve done to the oceans, the destruction we’ve done to land, how toxic it’s all become. The air is going to be much more toxic. The weather patterns are going to be much crazier than they already are, and they’re already pretty crazy. These things I think are going to be so much more extreme that people are going to not be able to avoid them. I think it’s just going to become much more of a given that we’ve really, really trashed our planet.
A second one is I believe it’s going to be much more obvious the damage we’ve done to other species on the planet. I think a lot of animals that we now take for granted are either going to be extinct or almost extinct. I’m talking about whales, dolphins, elephants, tigers, lions, lots of the big carnivores, bears—just a lot of things that require quite a bit of nature to survive. Especially the top predators, they’re just not going to be around anymore, or they’re gonna be almost gone. Maybe some will be left in zoos, but they’ll just be relic species.
A third thing, there’s going to be a big shift in how people view having children. I think now it’s still much more considered a positive thing to have children. People, especially those with lots of children, they’re very lauded in society. People are very proud of having lots of kids, lots of grandkids. How even this old person has 14 great-grandchildren! I think that’s going to change. I think in 20 years, there’s going to be much more of a view where people are critical of people having children. They’re going to ask a lot more questions about people’s motivations for wanting to have children, and they won’t be so positive in society about how many children people have, and even if they have any children at all. I think because they’re gonna realize that one of the big problems, it’s not just overpopulation in terms of seven or eight or however many, 10 or 12 billion people there will be. It’s that even a few hundred million of us is too many. I think people are going to start to get a grip that our species is really just over-ex out of control, beyond anything that is really ecologically acceptable. I think that the onus of responsibility is going to fall much more onto parents, which in my opinion is where it belongs. Because after all, parents do create the next generation of children that create the next generation of children.
A fourth thing, people are going to be much more critical thinking-wise about how we eat. I think it’s gonna be much less popular to eat meat. I think people will be like, “Why are you doing that? We know that it’s bad for the world, it’s bad for ecology.” Yeah, it might in some ways be healthy for some people, and it’s certainly an easier way to get protein and fat in our diet. But let’s also make it a good thing for the world, and it isn’t necessarily even healthy for a lot of us. Of course, that doesn’t mean that necessarily going ahead and eating just vegetables is good, because so many vegetables are grown in such a horrible way. Just a prime example, I think if it’s the state of Iowa in the United States, it’s like what percentage of the state of Iowa is just covered in cornfields and genetically modified cornfields? It’s just ridiculous the way that we grow plants for our own food. I mean, what percentage of my own diet comes from animals or plants that really live in nature? It’s like basically nothing. It’s all just farmland, and farmland has just wiped out nature in so many places. So that’s another one—much more critical thinking about how people eat.
The fifth one is that there’s going to be much more talk in a practical, scientific, realistic way about the end of our species. That Homo sapiens just isn’t lasting. Something’s going to really go wrong, and it’s going wrong in 20 years. I think people are gonna see, “Oh my god, we’re gonna be seeing the writing on the wall much more.” Right now, the writing on the wall is pretty faint, or a lot of people aren’t looking at the wall, or they really don’t even know how to read that kind of writing yet. But I think in 20 years, it’s going to be much more clear that there’s going to be some really bad things that are going to happen in the very near future, or perhaps they will have already started.
A sixth thing, the world is going to be a much less safe place in 20 years. I think there’s going to be a lot more poverty, a lot more war. I think there’s going to just be a lot more fear in society in general. I think it’s not going to be as happy a place as it is now, and I’m not saying it’s perfect now, because it certainly isn’t. But I think it’s going to be much more clear that it’s just not a safe place. It’s not a safe world. It’s not as good.
Another thing, we’re gonna see the, if not the end, the looming end of fossil fuels. We’re not going to have cheap travel like it was—cheap fuel for cars, for generators, all these things. There’s going to be a massive shift toward other ways to produce fuel. I don’t necessarily think that’s going to be good either, especially if it goes nuclear. I think it’s way too dangerous to have nuclear fuel. I think we’re a species that’s proven ourselves far too irresponsible with these kinds of powers. But then other forms of power, wind power—is that really that good? Look at the damage that does to the environment. Certainly, and certainly water power, it’s like that creates tons of problems. Solar power, maybe. But I think a lot of these things, they have all sorts of nasty side effects to go along with them. So I think there’s going to be much more consciousness also about how we use power and how we get our power. Maybe there’ll be a lot less power in terms of living our lives. Who knows?
I think another thing we’re gonna see is a lot less casual world travel. I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve been all around the world, been in all the continents except for Antarctica. I see people when I travel—tons and tons of other travelers, more and more all the time. But I think in 20 years, I think it’s gonna really start to decline. I think the world is going to be a very different place. I think the lack of safety, I think the ending of fossil fuel, a lot of these things, it’s just not going to be such an easily accessible world to go visit all the far corners.
I think another thing that’s gonna happen is there’s gonna be a lot more terrorism, a lot more mayhem going on. I think it’ll be a lot easier for individual people to create this terrorism, to create mayhem. I think with the rise of technology, it’s gonna make it much cheaper and easier for people to access very destructive weapons and ways to make destructive weapons.
Another thing that’s gonna happen, I think people are going to be a lot more depressed, a lot more hopeless, and a lot more angry. So I think as hopelessness goes up, as desperation goes up, as rage goes up, we’re gonna see a lot more suicidal people acting out that way. Their life doesn’t really mean that much to them, so they might as well take on a lot of others with them. I think it’s already happening, but I think it’s gonna get a lot worse.
Going to happen is a lot more young people are gonna be very, very angry at their parents’ generation, at their grandparents’ generation, at the great-grandparents’ generation for basically cheating them out of a future. I think a lot of young people are gonna realize, wait a second, we don’t have a future. We don’t have jobs like there used to be. We don’t have nature to live in like it used to be. There’s not the level of healthiness in the environment that there was. There’s all these different things that our past generations just wiped out in their selfish, rapacious way of living. And so I think that there is going to be a lot more feelings of betrayal and anger that go along with that.
Another thing we’re gonna see in 20 years is a lot more people with physical illnesses, and maybe even major physical illnesses, that are related to environmental toxins. So basically, poisons and trash and garbage that people have put out in the world, it’s going to be coming back to us, to our species, much more. Right now, animals and plants and fungi and the ocean are suffering from this toxin much more, but humans live in a bubble. We really work really hard—or not all, certainly a lot don’t—but a lot of people, they really put a lot of effort into living in a bubble and keeping the distance from the poison that’s in the world. We really live separate from nature. We throw our garbage into nature, but we live away from it.
Well, I think that that barrier between nature and us, the poison that we’re throwing out there and us, is going to begin to break down. That’s going to filter, and we’re not going to be able to keep it out of our lives as much as we do now. And I think the result is a lot more people are gonna be sick in all sorts of ways. And maybe one good thing of that is we’ll have a lot more empathy for nature and for animals, for the poisons we’ve put in them. I think often of dolphins, just like how basically almost every dolphin in the world that lives out in nature is just full of heavy metals, toxic stuff, and their fat and their meat. They’re really just like such unhealthy animals. That’s another reason they can even be around, even if they do have food to eat. Well, the toxins pile up in their body so much that they just get poisoned to death. I don’t know, but I think it’s gonna start happening to us too.
I think another thing that’s going to happen is people as a whole are going to be much more open to really radical and often violent types of change in the world. Violent and radical types of upheaval. And although upheaval and change and revolution is not necessarily inherently a bad idea to my mind, because I think a lot of change is important and could really help us profoundly, but I think people are going to go for more easy answers. I think especially early on, and I think 20 years is still early on before major, even bigger changes come. But I think the types of changes people are going to go for are a lot of other blaming kind of changes. They’re going to go for like changes in going after people of other races, other religions, more than we already do now. People of other economic classes, people in other countries, going toward foreigners living in our countries. There will be a lot more xenophobia. These kind of easy changes, I think it’ll be a lot of people trying to defend their own, trying to keep out other people, and trying to protect their little part of the world.
I think there’s still going to be a real lack of people seeing that we actually live on one planet. We all live together, and we have to work together as a species. I think there’s going to be a lot of an idea of still, this is mine, that is yours. You do what you want in yours, and I’ll try to take advantage of you, but as long as it—and I don’t want you to take advantage of me, but stay out of my land.
This is kind of a random one, but I think in 20 years, space programs like NASA and the equivalent in other countries, they’re going to get much less funding if they even exist at all. I think a big part of the reason why a lot of these space programs get funded, a lot of the reason that people at least like them to be funded, is there’s an idea that we can use outer space somehow to escape from our planet. When we’ve totally trashed it enough, we’re going to find some way to escape to another planet. We’ll have little colonies, not necessarily on Mars, but maybe on some planet orbiting some other star somewhere out in the universe. The problem is, from all I’ve seen and all I’ve read, it’s basically impossible. We can’t even live on Antarctica in any sustainable way except for more than a few people. We can’t live underneath the ocean very far. We don’t have colonies down there. We really can’t survive almost anywhere except in certain habitable parts of our own planet.
Another thing that I think is going to happen in 20 years is there’s going to be much more polarization in terms of religion. And I think what’s going to happen, the shift is going to be—I’m not even talking about which religion—but I think people are going to shift in one of two directions. They’re going to shift into one polarity of being much more religiously fundamental, so there can be a lot more religious fundamentalism. And on the other extreme, there’s going to be a lot more atheism. And when I look at the atheistic side, I think it’s going to be much more looking at the world through a lens of science, of definable practical realities, of what we can see, what we can test, and what we can measure. And I think those people are going to just not at all be interested in listening to arguments of faith.
But I think there’s also going to be a lot of people who are just going to be very caught up in the fundamentalist world, more so than now. And I think the reason is, is because the practical, observable, measurable scientific is going to be so absolutely horrible that people aren’t going to want to look at it. They’re gonna want to escape from it. They’re gonna want to say, oh my God, give me faith. Give me faith that there’s going to be a future life, that I’m gonna come back somewhere else, that this is all just a big mistake, that there’s going to be a salvation, that there’s a great reason for all of this. And who knows, there may be even brand-new fundamentalist religions that come up. I wouldn’t be surprised, actually. It would be kind of interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a religion that says we’re all going to be reborn on another planet somewhere else in the solar system, or that a religion that says that all this that’s going on right now is just a big experiment for some outside people and this actually doesn’t really matter at all.
I think another thing we’re gonna see is even more quantum leaps forward in technology. So technology would be so much more ubiquitous that in a way, people are just gonna be living through technology far more than they do now. I don’t necessarily see this as a positive thing at all. I feel lucky that I got to live over 20 years of my life before there was much technology. I mean, I grew up with telephones and television, but no cell phones, no internet. I didn’t have internet until I was almost 24 years old, and I consider that a really positive thing. I did a lot of traveling when I carried nothing on me that was electronic. And I think it’s going to become so much more extreme with technology in 20 years that people are going to really lose a lot more connection with intimacy, a lot more intimate connection with other people.
I think another thing that’s going to happen as a result of so much more ubiquitous technology is that there’s going to be a lot more governmental spying.
Are going to be much more paranoid, I think. In one hand, they’ll be much more afraid, realistically, that they don’t have any privacy. I think there’s going to be so much less privacy. But I think also that people are going to have a lot more paranoia. They’re going to be afraid of anything that they think, anything that they do, anything that they talk about, anything that they write is going to be seen, is going to be spied upon. And so that worries me.
I also wonder, hand-in-hand with this, they’re gonna be in 20 years. And this, this is a speculation. I bet there will be, actually, I bet there will be a lot more people who pull away from technology, who live outside of it. People who are Luddites, people who don’t want computers, who don’t want phones, who don’t want the internet, who don’t watch television. People who are really trying to live a much more non-electrical, non-electronic life. And I think a lot of people will find a lot more value in that.
And then the last really negative thing that I think is gonna happen, it has some positive in it, but it’s also negative. Before I get to some of the positive ones that I think are going to happen, well, I guess this is kind of a positive. I think the positive is that people are gonna realize much more the horror of psychiatric drugs. I think part of why it’s a negative thing is I think there’s going to be a lot more use of psychiatric drugs. They’re going to be produced a lot more cheaply. There’s a lot more people are going to be on them and on higher numbers of them.
But I think people are going to realize, as a society, and not just the United States, but around the world, more and more just the danger of psychiatric drugs. How addictive they are, how horrible they can affect people in terms of side effects, how difficult they are for so many people to get off them, especially some of the different types of drugs. Like how some people can’t even get off them, how people go absolutely crazy when they try to get off of them. And how I think there’s going to be a lot more awareness of how unscientific the research behind these drugs were and how our societies have basically been conned into telling people that they were good and they were helpful.
I think also people are going to be much more aware of how psychiatric drugs are used as means of social control and how, in the long run, they really do not help people go forward on their life journey. They don’t help people grow, they don’t help people heal from their traumas, and actually, they do the opposite. They really stop people from growing and healing in most cases, and they really stunt people in so many different ways. So there’s gonna be a lot more awareness of that. That’s a good thing.
Now, some of the positive things that I think are gonna happen are, first, they’re gonna be a lot more people who put a lot more focus on grieving their past and looking at their past. I think there’s going to be more of a societal awareness—god, I sure hope there will be—of people who realize the value of exploring their childhood, of realizing that what happened to them as children, when they weren’t responsible for their existence, when they weren’t responsible for their destiny, and they couldn’t really control their fate and they couldn’t control their environment, that that actually made them into who they are. That that created the problems that they have as adults.
I think people are going to be looking at that a lot more, and they’re going to be exploring it. They’re going to be doing a lot more grieving, and I think there’s going to be more societal acceptance of that. I also think people are going to be critiquing their parents much more. They’re going to be looking at what their parents did to them, and they’re gonna be much more open to looking at that.
There’s going to be a lot more people who are gonna be breaking away from their parents, confronting their parents and saying, “What you did to me wasn’t right. The society that you put me into was not right. You were not prepared to have children. You were not prepared to raise a child in a healthy way. You were far too screwed up. You had too much work. You didn’t have enough time. You didn’t have enough of a loving relationship with my other parent, if my other parent was in the picture at all. You were abusive in all these different ways. You were acting out the abuse that you suffered as a child unto me. You replicated so much of what happened in previous generations onto me.”
I think that as more and more people do this healing work and looking at their history and grieving their traumas and really exploring their traumas, there will be a groundswell of healing that happens. And to me, this is the hope of 20 years in the future. And I believe it’s going to happen because I believe that as things get more destructive, something new has to come out of the ashes of this. Some Phoenix has to rise out of the absolute horror that we were committing on our planet.
I think as denial breaks, reality is going to burst up. And what is the reality? The reality is child abuse, of what we’ve all suffered, all in different ways, some more extreme than others, but we’ve all suffered it.
The final thing that I think is going to happen is that people who are doing this real healing work, real grieving, really studying their traumas, really breaking from the traditions of their parents and their grandparents, and often breaking from their parents and from their families, breaking out of the cults that they’ve come from, the family cults. What we’re gonna see is these people are going to find each other.
I think technology will help, but I think as it becomes more and more common for people to do this, it’ll be easier for people to find fellows, peers who have done this. And as people find more companions, they’re going to come together more in community. And I think we’re going to see a lot more communities of people doing this grieving, this healing of their ancient childhood history.
I think as people form these communities, there is going to be something new that happens. And I think that something new is going to be hope at a whole deeper level. And I think out of this, if there’s any hope for humanity, it’s going to be that a new species, not Homo sapiens, but something new. Something new that doesn’t traumatize each other, that doesn’t traumatize nature, that doesn’t exploit, that lives much more sustainably, that’s aware of all this horrible stuff that’s happening, aware of the horrible mistakes that history has made, that people have made. And when people become more aware of this, they’re going to be able to change.
I think if there’s any hope for our future, it’s going to be these forming communities. And I predict that in 20 years, there’s going to be a lot more.