Being A Futurist Is Hard Work!
And it usually pays nothing in money.
Seeing the connections . . . imagining the future possibilities; the excitement it elicits in me is hard to describe to someone practical, who lives completely in the hard reality of now.
Sometimes you won’t even get it yourself, when it comes to why you like a certain idea, but you’ll know intuitively something is there! Just beyond your mental grasp. It will become obvious soon enough, or years and sometimes decades in the future.
This complex mindset required can be described, but you’ll need to develop it yourself!
Critical thinking is essential. You must have exceptional creativity, and develop and curate it constantly. You probably even dabble as an artist in some medium or media, if not several. Ask questions of anything generally accepted as the norm. You are basically a disrupter of calm unquestioned thinking; you’ll try explaining something several different ways to a friend, but they still won’t get it.
Face it, they don’t have your mindset. If they value your creativity, they might be secretly jealous, trying to emulate you. Proposing ridiculous ideas you know are nonsensical or unreasonable or a joke. Some can even be passive aggresive. Look out for those, some may not even realize they are doing it. If you wish to keep them as friends, don’t point it out to them, cause they usually are somewhat fragile, and may get angry at you.
You may even loose relationships over your unbridled exuberance. You will be well educated, read a lot, but not be pompous or arrogant about it (aside from this article). If they do think you’re arrogant, they really don’t understand you at all. You can’t afford to turn off people at first appearance. You’ll surround yourself with unusual friends, collect them in fact. For who else would listen politely to your useless ramblings. You’ll ask others questions when you don’t understand something, and won’t be embarrassed by it.
You’ll actually enjoy being the dumbest or at least most uniformed person in a room full of apparently well educated geniuses.
You probably enjoy reading and watching science fiction. The kind that’s not so violent, that requires deeper thought, and other people find confusing or boring, real thinking science fiction.
In a crowded movie theater, you maybe the only one that spontaneously laughs out loud, because you got some subtle bit of humor which went right over everyone else’s head, get use to it.
Face it, you’ll have lots of opinions about things, and you won’t hold them in. You’ll piss some people off, but you won’t intentionally try, your not a troll. You probably don’t worship money, you see it only as a tool; to get what you want, that new pricy piece of tech, that you can barely afford. You had to build it yourself from cheaper parts, scrape the money together, beg and borrow steal to get it into your greedy little imaginative hands.
All just to figure out how it works, how it affects the future, and what actually comes next? You may find your thinking hundreds of years ahead or just 5-10.
I can’t really tell you how many new ideas I’ve thought of, or about other people I didn’t even know, who executed them successfully. Some of the ideas I tried lost significant money. Your dealing with the edge of what is thought possible, it’s to be expected.
You might do drugs, but not the really hard kind. Certainly nothing that would affect your reasoning or powers of thought negatively, you value your mind and freedom from any form of addiction. You definitely enjoy what others might think are weird things, but not those that hurt others. You think dangerous thoughts.
You might be a hacker, able to do both great good and bad, but you always choose the light. You value friendship and love above everything. You always help others who matter to you, and even those you shouldn’t. You are generous to a fault. You are altruistic. Probably an atheist. Never immoral. Honest sometimes to your own determent.
You’ll need to make new words for things and concepts that don’t exist yet, at least once or twice a year.
You don’t give up on people as easily as they do you. You might suffer from depression, or even be bi-polar II (highly functional). Thinking outside the norm can stretch your mind, but hopefully not to the breaking point. We all need help sometimes, definitely seek it out.
Finally, you should be proud of yourself.
You are the pinnacle of uniqueness. The key ingredient which embodies innovation itself. Without your ideas, even if they are stolen from you, thought of again by someone else, emulated or added to by others, never acknowledge as yours, without them, there would be no change, no future, only stagnation!
We are a society of sometimes boring, and repetitively mindless and change-resistant people, you are part of that society, and yet separate still, because of how you think. You are what you are, accept yourself, don’t apologize for it, revel in it!
Dream, and if you can, help make that future, but remember, tame that ego.
