We could argue that we are living in one of the most absurd moments in human history — a time when we – as a planet – have everything needed to satisfy our needs and live peaceful lives, yet we remain paralyzed by the weight of our present conditions.
Violence and wars, poverty and inequality, the concentration of power in the hands of a few, pollution, rising suicide rates, and the quiet epidemic of depression — these are not problems that can be solved within the conditions that created them. No amount of effort applied to the present system will produce the future we need.
The energy of our time must not be wasted trying to fix what cannot be fixed from within. It must go entirely toward building something new.
There was a time when visionary people gave direction to the future, and one very simple example was the construction of the 7 Train subway line in Queens, NYC, around 1910 — built before anyone was living there, before a single housing building had been erected. The train ran through the middle of fields and farms. It now transports thousands of people per hour at peak time.
The builders didn’t fix the old roads. They laid new tracks through empty fields.
Today’s work is to build tomorrow’s reality — and there are already signs pointing in that direction, visible to those who know how to read them.
Diversity is one of these signs. In all its forms, diversity is now recognized across every field — in science, technology, culture and ethnicity, sexual orientation, food, art, politics, and more. Large institutions are collapsing into fragmented structures that converge depending on the situation and the needs of the moment, making them highly adaptable and flexible, yet far more complex to manipulate and control. There is no longer a single dominant model.
Technology offers another example. The rise of open-source software has demonstrated how an idea can scale across the modern world and continue adapting into the future. Linux was created in 1991 by a Finnish student at the University of Helsinki as a free, open-source hobby project. Motivated by the limitations of the Minix operating system and a desire to explore 80386 hardware, he developed a terminal emulator that evolved into a Unix-like kernel. Today, the Linux family of operating systems operates as the “invisible backbone” of modern technology, dominating backend infrastructure, cloud computing, and embedded devices, while growing steadily on the desktop. Linux now powers over 96% of the top one million web servers and 100% of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. Some engineers argue that AI should follow the same open-source model if it is to remain relevant and not become locked in the hands of a few corporations.
Renewable energy has also surged over the past decade at a scale that was once difficult to imagine — another sign that when need and vision align, transformation follows.
Everything — from local to global structures — is moving in the direction of complementarity, exchange, and borderlessness, including economy, science, communications, production, and even political systems. Beneath the world’s oceans lies a vast network of fiber-optic cables that forms the true nervous system of the global digital economy. More than 95% of global data traffic — including financial transactions exceeding $10 trillion daily in foreign exchange markets, diplomatic communications, and global e-commerce valued at more than $5.8 trillion annually — travels through these submarine cables. We are not moving toward interdependence. We are already inside it.
Just as new models must be built, old ones must be left behind. There are technologies whose continued existence is incompatible with any livable future. Chief among them are nuclear weapons, whose very existence threatens our collective survival. They have no place in the world we are building.
Even our educational systems belong to another era. They were designed to solve standard, predictable problems — but the future belongs to those who can navigate the nonstandard, the ambiguous, the genuinely unknown. These are precisely the problems that AI cannot resolve, understand, or control.
There are also mental structures inherited from a previous era that must be left behind. Chief among these is the notion of “us vs. them” — a construct that has produced immeasurable suffering, erected walls between people, and foreclosed the very cooperation the future requires. If there is no “us” and no “them,” there is only humanity, bound by shared values and the common work of learning to inhabit this planet together.
Underneath this, though, lies something deeper: a broad lack of self-knowledge — the capacity for introspection, for understanding one’s own formative landscape, for distinguishing between different levels and states of inner experience. The outer structures we are trying to build will not hold if the people building them remain opaque to themselves.
This is not an appeal to retreat from the suffering of today’s world. It is a recognition that durable change has never originated from within the structures it seeks to transform. The crises we face were not naturally made. And our capacity to respond to them depends, more than we acknowledge, on our ability to intentionally define what we are building and why.
The field of the future is largely untouched. Those working in it tend to be less consumed by present urgencies and more focused on preparing the ground for what comes next. Empathy and the ability to hold complexity are future-proof capacities — not because they are soft skills, but because the genuinely nonstandard problems ahead cannot be navigated by calculation alone. The people who will shape tomorrow will be those committed to something larger than themselves: the generations that follow, the human being still being formed, the simple insistence that human life carries meaning. When everything is understood as connected, what goes wrong in one place is understood to have consequences everywhere — and that understanding changes how a person moves through the world.
The task before us is not simply to solve problems, but to expand the depth and scale of human experience itself — to build, as those engineers did in the fields of Queens, before the city yet exists.
