Foundations Before Outcomes: The Future Beneath Your Feet | How to Think About the Future Pt 5, Frankly 150

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. If you have been following this channel, you know that I have a lot to say. And I have so much more to say in the near future. I've got 15 Franklies in various stages of completion, including what is debt and why does it matter, seven ways growth ends, the 15 recommendations, unordinary recommendations for the meta crisis, and lots of other things. I want to finish this series first, and I had outlined part five in this series to be about no regret responses to all the composite worlds we built from part four. But on a bike ride, I realized something interesting. So, I'm going to punt that to part six, and this is part five. This whole series has been about civilizational futures, two by two grids that describe growing or contracting economies, different power structures, geopolitics and earth systems. Painting descriptive pictures of life in the various composite worlds, and mapping the valleys and ridges and switchbacks of how we might get there. All macroscale stuff with an aim to help us think about what's coming for societies and nations and the biosphere, so we can make better decisions, and more often also to steer away from bad ones. But every single person watching or listening to this will also be navigating a personal version of those same landscapes.
And I realize that the dynamics I've presented so far are strikingly similar. There's probably a rhyming micro version of these macro frameworks. So today, that's what I want to do. I want to turn the lens inward and ask, how might these future landscapes map to the scale of a single human life? And how do we navigate towards the better valleys of the future for ourselves?
So, across this series, we built four grids, economic, power, geopolitics, and earth system, and then we combine them into four composite worlds.
I suggest those same dynamics have parallels in our individual lives. And what I came up with is I'll go through four things, two that we navigate, which is material throughput and agency, and then two that are foundations underneath that constrain what's possible. So, let's start with throughput. At the macro level, we ask whether the economy will be growing or contracting, and whether that growth or contraction is mostly regenerative or primarily destructive and extractive. At the personal level, the question is pretty much the same. Is your material throughput and the related complexity in your life expanding or simplifying? And in either of those cases, is that building you up or wearing you down?
These two things are interdependent from each other. You can be expanding your income, your career, your commitments, your material consumption, and all that expansion can be regenerative for you if it's actually aligned with your health and what matters to you. If the growth, the material growth that you have is in capability and relationships and meaning and personal development, it can be replenishing or even expand your own capacity for the various futures, or it can be extractive. Your career grows, but it sucks all your time with your kids or your dogs or your time outdoors. Your income rises, but your health declines because of the things you have to do to fuel it.
Your social status and your social presence might be expanding, but the depth of your actual relationships is thinning out at the same time. More activity and consumption, but depleting your ability to actually live life. On the other hand, you can be simplifying, spending less, owning less, doing less, and that can be regenerative too. You drop some obligations that were draining you, and you discover you sleep better, and you think more clearly, because your body now actually has time to recover in a natural non-modernity sense. On the other hand, it can also just be plain decline. You're contracting because you're exhausted, or you've given up, or you just can't sustain what you were doing anymore. Your simplification wasn't chosen. It just kind of arrives.
So, Personal Mordor is the one I think most of the TGS audience might recognize and resonate with, perhaps in an uncomfortable way. Your material throughput is expanding. The scorecard, our culture, taught us to look at income and career and productivity and social status says you're doing great, but underneath, you're drawing down the principle, your health, your closest relationships, your creative capacity, your ability to stay present in the moment. In contrast, personal long repair is the one that looks like failure by many of those same metrics of success, but personally feels like coming back to life. Just like the civilizational version, on the surface, this will look like decline to most people in our media, in our culture, less status, less stuff, less busy, probably less money, but better rested, more meals cooked at home, more connection to the green web of life outside, more actual conversations, deeper meaningful relationships, more attention to this moment.