I often find myself looking back on the present from the future.
I think this tendency comes from a place inside of me that thinks the future will be a different place than most of us imagine. Sure, the future is gonna be different, it has to be, but this time around, it’s gonna be different in a way that we’ve never really seen before: it will be a future of decline.
If we rewind and zoom out a little, “the future” has been that of extreme growth and expansion (population, technology, etc) for the last 150 years, since the discovery of oil. Everything in our world has changed (and continues to change) more rapidly than anything ever seen on earth before, aside from meteor strikes. Most people think of the Industrial Revolution as a period of extreme ingenuity, but I see it as a period of extreme energy influx (The Oil Revolution). All of a sudden, we had an incredibly concentrated fuel that was pouring out of the ground in copious amounts.
We’ve been riding that wave upward at an exponential rate for almost 2 centuries, and it’s just not physically possible to continue to maintain exponential growth in a finite world. At some point we’re gonna have to come down, at some point the Oil Revolution and the empires it facilitated will fail.
What stories will we tell of the days of oil and excess?
