In some ways this story is familiar, in other ways it is new.
Which is pretty much how the entire future gets written.
A few weeks ago, the CEO of a health insurance company was killed on the street in front of a hotel in New York City just before their annual investors meeting.
At least according to my social algorithm (I am always dubious about what YOU are seeing versus what I’M seeing), it seemed like the killer was largely celebrated — not for the murder, of course, but for how this act embodied the pent up rage that many Americans currently feel about the absurdity of our “Sick-Care” system.
For a moment, it looked like we were going to have a serious conversation about an objectively terrible system that fails absolutely everyone except executives and shareholders.
As I write this, there are horrific wildfires literally burning down full neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
If you didn’t know, I lived in LA for almost 10 years, mostly in Toluca Lake, which is about a mile up the street from Universal Studios. When feeling particularly ambitious with our regular evening walk, we would occasionally go all the way from our tiny apartment up the massive hill at the base of the theme park.
Go a little further down the 101, or just take Ventura Boulevard south until it turns into Cahuenga, and you’ll find yourself at the Hollywood Bowl, and then Magic Castle, which is also currently in imminent fire danger. As of now, it looks like any images of the iconic Hollywood Sign on fire are fabricated.
We loved going to the Getty Villa on weekends, which is basically in the Palisades, which is a neighborhood that is now gone. For now it seems the Villa is OK.
The consulting firm that launched my career was in La Cañada, which is right next door to Altadena, which is also currently on fire.
Are we on the verge of moment when we have a more serious conversation about how to take better care of our planet?
While scrolling this morning, I saw someone post something like: “It was always cheaper to fix climate change than it will be to live through the consequences.”
I get the sentiment, of course — and it’s almost certainly factually true — but somehow resenting that we didn’t fix things ahead of time is probably misunderstanding history.
Full disclosure: I used to hate history.
I seemed to be born with some kind of gene that places the default state of my brain somewhere 5-10 years in the future, so history, maybe naturally, felt rather pointless. I was looking AHEAD, not BACKWARDS, forgoodnesssake!
But now I see that the future is really just the sprouted reality of the seeds we plant today AND the ones we planted yesterday… which makes me VERY interested in history.
Maybe you’ve seen a post about how our sci-fi often worries about future time-travelers screwing up the future with one tiny change to the past, but we rarely think about how one tiny change WE make now could alter the future.
If things really happen gradually then suddenly, we would do well to study history, particularly any cycles that seem to repeat.
One thing I notice…
We humans are, seemingly, remarkably terrible at prevention.
We could get curious about the “chicken and egg” of this.
Are we terrible at prevention simply because we are pre-naturally disposed to being terrible at it? Meaning: are we just wired to be reactive? Is it some sort of bio-evolutionary firmware we have and can’t upgrade?
OR are we terrible at prevention due to generational conditioning? Is it that decades (or is it centuries?) of a predominantly break-fix, allopathic, symptom-treating heuristic that’s become deeply embedded in both our systems and our mindsets just causes us to essentially wait for all hell to break loose before addressing problems we all knew were pretty serious?
Put another way: what exactly tips a society into revolution?
Is it always the same thing?
If we look back at previous cycles, it seems pretty consistent that a common trigger is wealth inequality. Power collects asymmetrically regarding the accumulation of wealth until the 99% simply cannot stand it anymore. Historically, the wealthy have ignored this cycle, and therefore we’ve all been doomed to repeat it over and over.
Will this be what happens again in coming years??
In these ways, the current story playing out looks remarkably familiar, and my instinct says we’ll find out within the next 5 years or so.