Transcript

The Future is Calling Us | Dabney Standley | TEDxSHC Youth

[Music] tell your story change the conversation organized by students tedex youth at [Music] shc over the past few years I've been increasingly obsessed about the future now as a history teacher this is a little surprising and somewhat unfamiliar ground this Obsession like so many things began with the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic if you recall the pandemic began to take over our lives at the end of March and into April of 2020 by the summer we were being fed a steady diet of data usually in the form of charts then the terms flatten the curve and bend the curve became well understood references to the collective task in front of us our relationship with the future briefly changed we realized that our actions today had a clear impact on our lives in the future newspaper articles taught us that our actions today had exponential consequences in the future for most of us that was a short-term experience as vaccines were developed and administered and The virus's lethality diminished our Focus shifted back from the future to the present yet the experience got me thinking about my relationship with the future and my role as a history teacher I realized that I have to teach my students about the future Yogi Bara said that the future ain't what it used to be and today he is more right than ever for most of recorded history people saw the future as full of threats and and uncertainty stability was prized change was usually bad and and viewed with suspicion and fear that's changed in the past few centuries for most of the history of the United States particularly in the 20th century optimism about the future has been an important part of our culture however today in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century this Faith this positive view of the future has begun to fray according to the Pew research study done last year Americans are so more pessimistic about several aspects of the future of the United States than ever and a southern similar study about 10 years ago prior to the pandemic found that when asked about the country in 30 years significant majority said they saw a country in Decline I've pulled the students that I teach most of them are 15 16 and 17 year olds Twice first in 2021 and then just this year and a majority of my students often think about their lives in the future in five or 10 years and the majority of them are optimistic they're looking forward to college and the years that follow however like the Pew study when asked about the future of the United States and the World At Large a different picture emerges pessimism about the future increases from 10% to maybe 60% and interestingly the students and probably most people don't connect their personal future to the Future in a broader context they put their personal lives in the future in the context of their present lives not in a future that reflects a broader context in the commentary students wrote about part of their as part of that questionnaire some interesting nuances emerged compared to 2021 pess ISM has deepened with specific anxieties around the future of democracy climate change the direction of our society earlier sources of optimism such as technological advances are now more nuanced they're balanced with concerns about potential threats those advances pose as a teacher I was particularly interested in the question how much do you think you can help shape the future future not surprisingly the results were mixed on the edges there were those who think yeah it definitely can have an impact in the future and they were balanced by those who were like yeah I definitely cannot but two quotes reflect the majority of the views the first one individuals can do next to nothing alone only with the help of many will meaningful change occur with the help of others I hope to accomplish a lot and the second I think that the impact of one individual it's hard to make a difference I think the future needs to be improved by all of us if the covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything it's that large problems are not going to be solved by someone else the challenges we face in the future require us that we act together as a community but in the 21st century there were more changes happen happening and they're happening at a faster rate than ever before by many accounts we've passed this inflection point where the rate of change is now higher than our ability to adapt to it most of our public institutions were simply not designed for this pace of change our students our children know about the immense challenges they face but they don't know how to connect their present lives to their lives in the future where they're living with those challenges this isn't something I'm imposing on our kids we adults we're modeling this behavior these choices and that inaction for them they look to us we can do better we have to do better we have to find new explicit ways to connect the present to the Future and in many ways the pandemic provides a model we saw then how our Act in the present would bend the curve in the future we all took action often different ones in different places and the effects of our actions like maske wearing and social distancing here in San Francisco to name a couple were relayed to us in the weeks and months that followed in the form of charts and graphs of infection rates across the media but more than just feedback was that the future we were working for that return to normaly was one that we could practically see and feel we had a relationship with it it was this relationship the the familiarity the emotional attachment that enabled us to work towards it to take action but when we don't think that much about the future when we don't empathize with our future selves when we don't imagine what it feels like to live in a possible future we forego the opportunity to bend the Arc of the future in a Direction that we want as Jane mcgonagal an author and researcher at The Institute for the future in paloalto California has observed our future selves are strangers to us literally fmri studies show that our brain when we shows it when we we imagine ourselves in the future our brains behave as if we're thinking about a stranger a completely different person and the farther out you go the more stranger we are to ourselves this makes it far more difficult to empathize with our future selves in contrast that to our relationship with our past selves we can look back and remember not only what we were doing in the past but often how we felt the emotions we feel today are sometimes nearly as raw as they were at the time but if we feel if we treat our future selves like strangers it's so much harder to develop that empathy so empathy is based on your ability to push past your own perspective so you can appreciate someone else's a friend or strangers and understand how they're seeing things and and how they're feeling self-control our ability not to make impulsive decisions in the present is based on empathy as well except that the stranger with whom you're empathizing is your future self when we exert self-control say not to buy that thing or to order that rich dessert we're doing it based on our relationship with our future selves because we're empathizing with them Ed young noted this in his article in the Atlantic he said it's your present you taking a hit to help out future you our empathy for our future selves is needed to drive our choices in the present looking at my students most of them do imagine themselves in the future there's there is a connection the problem is is that they can imagine themselves in the future and when they do it's a future that looks like today we need to start thinking about a future that doesn't look like today any more than today looks like it did 20 years ago when Apple didn't make phones a Swedish company named Nokia made the best smartphones and there was no Instagram no Apple pay no Ubers no Teslas on the road no Spotify in so many ways it was a different world and we need to imagine ourselves in a world that is that different some of you may be thinking look how can you possibly do that how can you create a future context when it hasn't even happened yet and it turns out with the Advent of the atomic age in the late 1940s we developed the ability to wipe out Life as we know it on the planet we also started to develop methods to forecast the future to help manage that risk not to predict it but just to take a few threads from the present and follow them out into the future and ask what if this is a skill that can be learned there are defined approaches and methodologies that have been successfully used to prepare future scenarios many of the same skills we Ed to study history exploring what's changed over time and why it did to seek to understand what it was like to live in the past we can use those to create an understanding of what it will feel like to live in the future to develop possible Futures stories of what might happen in the future we draw on both historical drivers of change and sources of change and stability in the present we can teach students how to create Rich future scenarios based on equally rigorous thinking skills so that they can see possible Futures and empathize with their future selves living in those scenarios some of those scenarios may not be pretty what does it feel like to live in a place where the temperatures are above 115 degrees for weeks or months instead of a few days each year or when there's no more snow on the mountains of Colorado or California and how that changes how much water you have for the rest of of the year but it's not just Doom and Gloom it's also future scenarios based on Hope based on actions we can take today we can help our children and ourselves think more deeply more clearly about what it might be like to live in the future by connecting our future selves with thoughtful positive future narratives we're better equipped to make the necessary choices and take the needed action now now to bend the curve of the future into one which we want to live and now more than ever we Face challenges at a scale that require us to act now as Robert Kennedy said our future may lie beyond our vision but it is not completely beyond our control our future is literally calling out to us begging us not to be ready to adapt to it but to shape it it demands our attention we must act now to show our future selves our children and the generations to come the care they deserve thank you