Welcome to Q2 of the 21st Century
After a pretty lame Q1, how should we think about the next 25 years?
Happy New Year everyone! And not only is it a new year, we’re now into the second quarter of the 21st Century. We’re 25 years in, and whether you were born in Q1 or are old enough to remember all the way back to the antiquated times of last century, it’s as good a time as any to think about how we want to approach the next 25 years. Given all the turbulent change we experienced since 2000, it is a solid bet that more is coming. We need to decide now if we are going to meet this change and shape it to work for us, or if we are simply going to let it happen to us.
The first quarter of this century was quite the ride, seeing us careering into the interrelated catastrophes of violent geopolitics, global economic crises, and head-spinning technological change. Throw in massive political corruption and wealth concentration, and it feels like we are living in a new Gilded Age, an echo from 150 years ago.
Dr. Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote a thought-provoking op-ed exploring how the Gilded Age was brought to an end in the context of our current woes. For those looking for inspiration from the past to curb the political violence, corruption, and abuses of power of today, he writes:
Reformers tried. Idealistic elites sermonized and editorialized, often looking smug and out of touch. Their vision of reform usually meant returning to an older way of life, dimly recalled from before the Civil War. As long as reform meant going backward, it lost at the ballot box, the stock exchange and the corner saloon.
It took a new generation, which could not remember this bygone age, to rein it all in. Men and women born around the Civil War had no better world to claw back. They knew only how unmoored society had become. After several generations of society doubling down on the same tendencies, around 1900 a generation chose to live in resistance to the world they knew.
We are certainly in the era of idealistic elites sermonizing and editorializing about bygone eras. Both U.S. political parties, as well as many in Europe, are guilty of holding visions of reform mostly tied to an older way of life. For Democrats and Republicans, preferred solutions mostly come down to whether you believe strong postwar labor institutions or rigid social hierarchies were the foundation of Ward Cleaver’s 1950s. But a consensus goal across the political class of finding our way back to a post-WWII renaissance instead of meaningfully grappling with questions of the future is unsurprising given the absolutely shameful lack of young people of note guiding either party.
I am guilty of looking for solutions in the past as well, although my happy place is the 80s and 90s. For someone of the Xennial generation (aka the “Oregon Trail Generation”), which is the micro-generation spanning both the analog and digital eras, it’s all too easy to say “gee, things were better back then, so let’s just do that.” Let’s listen to records and stay off social media and things will work out.
Alas, nostalgia is not a plan for thriving amidst technological and societal change, and rings especially hollow for younger generations. It will not make the poisonous effects of social media misinformation disappear. It won’t save your job from AI. It won’t stop billionaires from becoming trillionaires. Doubling down on what we’ve done before and hoping things go better has allowed us to be duped again and again by the profit-seeking instincts of late-stage capitalism. It is a bitter irony that the same companies that have subjected us to economic and geopolitical distress have done so by “monetizing” and poisoning the human connections we would otherwise rely on to cope with such distress.
No, the only way is forward, applying relentless creativity to building a more contented and purpose-driven reality for ourselves over the next 25 years. This will require reinventing a new framework for life in the digital age. It will require intentionally, painfully clawing back space to think for ourselves, and then sharing those precious insights with each other. We are going to have to trade our practiced cynicism and social media snark for earnestness and transparency. And we are going to have to figure out a new way of being on this planet, with each other, and with ourselves that we haven’t yet had the audacity to imagine.
For me, this starts with better understanding the Soul Dividend. We must recognize in ourselves, and each other, that precious uniqueness that isn’t shaped by an algorithm, or passed through a filter, or stuffed with derivative ideas from AI. It is from this place that we’ll find a new way forward. Technology has changed how we move through life, but it hasn’t changed the creative act. We know that creating something new has always taken a spark of inspiration igniting a pyre carefully assembled from our life experiences. It doesn’t happen by an algorithm guessing the next word in a sentence.
We can take comfort in the past - I am one of those nerds that enjoys the intentionality of putting a record on a turntable and the psychic benefit of owning my favorite movies on disc, probably a relic of my Blockbuster-era childhood. But building a better future demands we look forward, harness our creativity, and break out of the shitshow that was the first quarter of the 21st Century.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have all the answers. But I think I have a decent idea of a process that will generate some. The reason why I’m spending my time thinking about this is because I am convinced if we don’t prepare ourselves now, we are going to be absolutely steamrolled by the accelerating social and economic impacts of AI, economic inequality, authoritarianism, and surveillance capitalism in ways that will make social media-induced anxiety look like a vacation. To be clear, I’m not worried about the “AI will kill all humans” fantasies popular in certain wealthy, insular tech circles. Our dystopia has proved to be much more boring than that. I’m talking about the continued erosion of purpose, focus, and happiness that has been the product of many techno-economic trends over the past 50 years, from offshoring to attention hijacking.
Preparation requires knowledge and organization in anticipation of action. I invite you to follow the Soul Dividend and check out previous posts so we can explore a new way forward together in 2026 and beyond.