Where the Future Actually Comes From

Why futurists, founders, novelists, and astrologers are all reaching for the same thing.

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I find it remarkable that lately, whenever I post about the future of culture and markets, I get astrologers in my comments and DMs saying they see the same thing in their forecasts.

There’s a meaningful convergence here that I immediately understand as a futurist, but I’d bet a lot of people in our industry do not. And that’s exactly what I want to explore here. I’m not interested in arguing for or against astrology but rather what lies just underneath this phenomenon: the fact that the future lives within our collective psyche.

If you want to know what world lies ahead, do not look outward into technologies, headlines and passing trends. Look inward to where we are feeling something we cannot yet name.

We marvel at how any number of novels from decades ago spelled out our current political climate. How something a stranger wrote online years ago suddenly reads like prophecy. I’ve worked with incredible founders who built exactly what the world needed, but they started years before the rest of us even realized it was something we were waiting for. And by the time they launched, culture had changed just enough to receive it with openness.

We’re all using different instruments to locate the same signal. When I talk to astrologers, they describe their work as using ancient systems to interpret what lies ahead. The chart may be fixed but the reading is alive and shaped by the emerging truth of the moment.

My work looks very different than that. I’ve spent a decade talking to people all around the country, in some of the most intimate conversations they’ve had about taboo topics or secret feelings, where it’s not uncommon for a call to end in tears or elation. My team and I listen to how people talk about their inner lives and the breathless feelings they struggle to put into words.

All of us who are in the business of deciphering the future do the same thing. We make ourselves sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and we give it language.

But that’s a really hard thing to do. Anyone who does this knows what it takes to give an invisible energy words. It feels like a small knowing that turns into a pull. That pull turns into its own gravity, and as it gets stronger it reorganizes your entire mental map around it. And as all of this pressure builds up inside your body, you struggle to name what the black hole at the center of it all is. It’s as far as a universe you’ve never been to, and as close as a word on the tip of your tongue.

This substrate, this collective subconscious, what Raymond Williams so perfectly called a “structure of feeling”, is what futurists and novelists and great founders and astrologers are all, in their own ways, trying to reach. Because unlike everybody else, they know this is where the future actually comes from.

In all of my years of doing this work, this is what I’ve found to be true: the inner precedes the outer, not the other way around.

Every innovation, every idea, every political movement, every natural disaster, every miracle, every tentpole event has to live within the larger psyche of its time. There is nothing that escapes the substrate. COVID was a disaster, but it was the energy of our collective subconscious that determined how it played out in reality. AI could be or do anything, but our mythologies and belief systems are what’s deciding the shape it takes.

Tentpole events like these are unique because they actually speed up the journey from subconscious to conscious. The loneliness crisis, the k-shaped economy, the great resignation and ideological divide were already there brewing in the background. COVID just surfaced them from the back of our minds and gave them new language. AI is doing the same thing for our long-simmering doubts about creativity, intelligence, and what makes a human worth paying. Those questions were already inside us, but now they’re undeniable.

These events don’t write the future, but they do accelerate the future that is already growing within people.

The inner to outer plays on the smallest of scales, as well. I’ve talked to single moms in the midwest who were spiritualizing their healthcare before any of us knew there would be a wellness economy. I’ve had long conversations with hiring managers that were creating content long before B2B thought leadership was financially lucrative. I’ve cried with lonely boomers - and their kids - before we knew a wave of no-contact was coming.

Which leads me to the big question here. Why are futurism and strategy and leadership so trained on outward signals? Trends, technologies, data points, and headlines all have their place, but these are confirmations of what’s already surfaced. The actual future is being written in the interiority of peoples’ hearts and minds.

It’s misguided to think the future is somewhere ahead of us. It's already inside us, distributed across millions of people who are feeling the same unnamed thing at the same time. Strategy, leadership, futurism are all, at their highest form, the same skill. They are the willingness to listen to that field, and have the nerve to translate it before it becomes obvious.

That’s why this work takes guts.

It requires that you take in all kinds of inputs you don’t always understand, to feel your way through them just as much as you think your way through them, and most crucially, to constantly be reorganizing your ideas around things that at best feel vague. And then of course, you have to have the guts to name it out loud.

It’s a real muscle to develop this orientation toward the world, and while I am always evolving my own practice, I do know a few things.

You have to always be interfacing with other people, and it has to be a wide and random cross section of people at that.

It’s both a blessing and a curse that my job makes this mandatory, because I’m constantly doing deep interviews with people from all walks of life, or I am doing interviews and orientation calls for community members around the world. For every 30 minute increment that I talk to these people, I am completely focused on them. I am in that conversation, in that moment, fully aware of what they are trying to communicate to me.

My calendar is a wall of phone calls Monday through Friday, and one of the unexpected side effects is that, by the end of the day, I am carrying so many conflicting feelings that I don’t even know which feelings are mine anymore. I am constantly creating containers in which me and other people can hold space together, and that is heavy emotional labor.

But the upside is that I get rare moments of directly touching that larger matrix of energy that holds us all together. I get to actually touch the subconscious that the future is coming from.

It’s also meaningfully changed the way I create the experience inside Exposure Therapy. I rarely bring in speakers who are strategists or academics anymore (except for when it’s people like Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman, who are coming to talk to us this week about why the ‘witch’ reemerges when the dominant cultural story breaks down for New Archetypes month). I bring in psychologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, therapists, memeologists, poker champions, guides, scientists and artists. We explore topics like awe, power, primal urges, morality and play, all alongside straight narrative and strategy and markets. It’s all the same reality.

I try to throw in some wildcard fun at our member parties with tarot and psychic readings, but even that doubles as a way to make ourselves open to other forms of paying attention, seeing what other people’s practices can teach us.

The more signals from the subconscious you expose yourself to, the better you become at reading the future. One form of knowing is not the rejection of another. That’s something I had to learn slowly, and only because I surrounded myself with people who insisted on it. I didn’t start my career thinking this way, and I wouldn’t be talking about it now if it didn’t measurably improve my work as a futurist.

But despite all of this, there’s one simple heuristic that always tells me when I’ve gotten it right.

The only feedback that matters is when people say to me, “You just named something I didn’t know I was feeling.” It happens anywhere, from my 1-on-1 conversations to the email responses I get to my articles. That’s when I know I’m tapping into the future.

People have an instinct for what’s coming because we are creating it from the inside out. But they have a really hard time accessing it. When you help them do that, it feels like a tremendous relief. And they will thank you for it.

I see the future most clearly in those exchanges, when we realize the deepest parts of ourselves are actually the same. When you feel that, the rest is obvious. Of course this is where the future comes from.

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One Last Thought

AI hurts because it's revealing all the implicit social contracts we hold dear, and how easily they can be broken. It's a violation that cuts deep. Now all we see is broken contracts everywhere.

P.S. We have a free lightning lesson on How To Train Your Instinct As A Brand Strategist happening this Thursday, May 21st. RSVP here.

Yours,

Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My course on How To Build A Culture Brand (next cohort closes June 7th)

• My private culture and strategy community Exposure Therapy

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