Mordor to the Long Repair: How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades? | How to Think About the Future Part 4, Frankly 148

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. This is part four of How to Think About the Future, where we will imagine what it's like to live in different versions of the future, at least these scenarios of the future. In parts one through three, we laid out foundational ideas, coupled systems, shortfall risks, and how to visualize possible futures as a landscape of ridges and valleys. I proposed four grids for economic growth or contraction, for power, for geopolitics, and for the earth system. Today, we'll build four whole worlds out of those pieces. Let's get into it.
Okay, mathematically, four grids with four quadrants each would give us 256 possible combinations. Of course, I'm not going to build 256 worlds in this video, or ever. Instead, I will highlight four here that are representative. But before we get to that, some context. First of all, these four futures are not equally likely. The economy, in my opinion, is not a coin flip between growth and contraction going forward, especially as the years and decades go on. Energy limits, resource depletion, too much debt, and ecological overshoot will all pull toward the contraction side, which is one of the core tenets of this platform. The Great Simplification is an economic simplification. We can still get regional growth, or growth in some sectors, or growth for a while, or growth in things that are not physical, but steady material physical growth for the whole world year after year, runs into walls that most big institutions and governments are not remotely anticipating, nor are the markets pricing in. So these four worlds lean towards contraction, not because I want contraction, but because the physics and the ecology point that way. You will notice that I do not build a green growth world, the one where we keep growing and heal the biosphere at the same time. Those two pull against each other too hard for that combination to hold at a global scale. And on the Earth system, we do not start from neutral. We have already loaded the atmosphere and the oceans and eroded Earth's carrying capacity, and a strained but workable biosphere is the best realistic case here. And a badly degraded one is now also on the table. Second, these grids are not independent. They interact with and pull on each other. For example, when resources get tight and the world outside looks hostile, governments tend to consolidate and then power concentrates. And people go along with this because they're afraid, and this has been the historical default. You can keep power broadly shared during hard times, but it takes unusual leadership and a lot of social trust.
And that's the path that we hope for. It just isn't the path of least resistance. Steady growth needs at least somewhat cooperative geopolitics because global just-in-time supply chains need a functioning, peaceful, for the most part, international order. And growth under what I referred to as the geopolitical danger zone in part two is very hard to sustain as the Iran situation is showing us in real-time slow motion. And severe earth system stress slowly eats away at our ability to govern human systems because constant crisis response burns through budgets, institutions, patients, and maybe most of all, any hopeful collective visions of the future. So these worlds have their own internal pull. Some combinations are stable, some are not, and will slide into something else. And some will take extraordinary effort to hold in place. One last thing, before we dive into scenarios. I'm building for, these particular four, to stretch our thinking, yours, and mine, and eventually others. I'm not handing you the four futures and asking you to choose one. I would actually invite you all to build your own composites with these grids, or create grids of your own. This is the logic and the thought process that I'm after here. The point is to think about what's possible, and where the risks are, and where the interventions really are, before we lurch into knee-jerk fixes, or worse, do nothing. Okay, so here are my four. World one, I'm calling the long repair. This is the managed contraction. And from where I sit today, this is actually the aspirational path. Hard but possible and worth striving towards. The composite looks like this. Contraction and ecological stewardship on the economy, what I've called the great simplification, broadly shared power and broadly shared material gains, cooperative geopolitics with a good deal of regional self-sufficiency, and a strained but workable biosphere. And technology aimed at making people more capable, like repair culture and regenerative tech, and open designs and tools that make us more competent instead of more dependent. So why do these pieces pull together? Because cooperative geopolitics takes the outside pressure off, the pressure that usually shoves governance towards authoritarian behaviors. And when you're not staring at a hostile outside world, holding on to democracy and open societies during contraction gets easier. And regional self-sufficiency means a Hormuz style type of shock doesn't ripple everywhere because regions have learned the lesson, not autarky, but they've shortened supply chains for what they depend on. And sharing power and gains builds and maintains the social contract and trust. So what would daily life feel like in the long repair? Material and energy use shrink. Fewer goods, fewer exotic choices, no GI. Joe with the Kung Fu Grip plastic toys, less travel, diets get more local and more seasonal. But social life probably gets richer for many because community starts to matter in practical ways again. We depend on our neighbors for things and in turn support them. Local decisions matter more because they're made closer to where they're implemented. Skills get re-grounded in regional needs. I suspect having competence becomes a higher status signal than credentials or degrees or fame. Work gets more physical again, more maintenance, more repair instead of things that are flex or are shiny. There's more growing food, more caring for people. On top of that, and importantly, more cultural respect for that kind of work. Less financial engineering, less marketing, fewer of what David Graeber called bullshit jobs. For a lot of people, this actually would bring more meaning to their lives, not less, even as they consume less stuff. And this exists in tiny forms all over the place already. Transition towns and regional food networks, community land trusts, energy co-ops, maker spaces, repair cafes. And the open question is whether these tiny islands of coherence, as this superorganism makes new highs, can still grow and start to connect or will remain isolated islands. So this is not a utopia. People grieve the futures that contraction takes off the table. There is still conflict and hardship and loss. But like my Lebanese friend communicated in last month's Frankly, there is community and deep bonding, and there's a shared sense that the project is worth being a part of. That the direction is chosen and fair, and that a smaller future is far from an empty one.