Today’s wrong question is: “So Josh, what future are we going to get?” Here’s why that’s the wrong question: it assumes the future is like a map with a singular destination point and we’re all just kind of hurtling towards it. But that’s not how the future works at all.
Last week I mentioned I’d share with you the most possible future paths. We’re going to call the first one Path Zero, because quite simply it sucks and we can’t allow it to happen. Let’s talk about that one first: Path Zero. This is what I call the “Don’t Look Up” Future. This is the one where we just keep going on the path we’re on. Capitalists keep optimizing everything for more capital. The importance of quarterly earnings beats long-term survival needs. The incentives never change because the people making capital decisions today, they won’t be around for the worst consequences anyway, so you know, who freaking cares?
Here’s what happens. Global average temperatures increase another two degrees. Coral reefs, which support roughly 25 % of marine species and contribute to the food security for at least a half a billion people are basically defunct. Another degree of warming pushes tropical agriculture into collapse. Hundreds of millions of climate refugees stress every political system on earth simultaneously. When this happens, the complexity that’s produced all our modern miracles, medicine, food distribution, global communication, it all starts unraveling because our endless extraction has destroyed the biological system all of it depends on.
This isn’t speculation. This is simply the path if current trajectories continue. Johann Rockström’s planetary boundaries research identifies nine Earth system boundaries we gotta stay within to maintain a stable biosphere. We’ve already blown through seven of those nine. But Path Zero, pardon my language, doesn’t give a shit.
I’m not willing to accept this path. I hope you aren’t either. Let’s talk about the other two.
Path A is what I call the Simplification Future. What if we collectively decided to want less, deliberately reduced complexity, localized supply chains, built regional resilience before the system forces that on us. That sounds radical until you realize it’s already happening, not by design, but by markets.
Anthropologist Joseph Tainter showed that complex societies collapse when they can’t sustain the energy needed to maintain their own complexity. I mentioned this briefly last week when we talked about the Roman Empire disintegrating into feudalism. When energy can’t be sustained, systems become what Tainter calls “nearly decomposable,” which just means they break into simpler, more independent units. This is what happened when the Roman Empire fragmented into feudal Europe. Same land, same people, but far lower complexity.
Accenture surveyed major global companies and found 85 % are actively planning to regionalize their supply chains by this year, 2026. GE is investing $3 billion to move appliance production to the Southeastern United States. The language of “nearshoring” has gone from academic to pretty standard corporate vocabulary in a very short amount of time. The system logic is pretty simple. Complex systems require ever increasing energy and coordination costs to maintain themselves. When those costs exceed returns, systems simplify because the math stops working. We may already be at that inflection point for parts of the global economy.
What does a simplified world actually look like? Think less “apocalypse” and more like just a different organization of human life. It would look more like regional food systems (which, by the way, are also growing rapidly). It would look like more distributed energy generation. It would look like less hyper specialization and more like communities that can actually function if the global supply chain hiccups. Some of you listening, you’ve already noticed this direction in your conversations or in your intuition.
The historical analog here isn’t Rome collapsing. It’s what happened after Rome in the regions that adapted well. For example, in that period, parts of what are now France and Spain developed remarkably resilient local economies, local governance, local food systems. The emotional truth of Path A is this: there is genuine beauty and peace available in a simpler, more local world. You might feel it as I’m describing it. To me, it almost feels like an exhale.
Life right now is not just complex, but complicated. And even the idea of simplification feels pretty nice. Also, the research on human wellbeing consistently shows that strong community relationships and meaningful work with visible outcomes and connection to place are among the most powerful predictors of life satisfaction. A world that’s less globalized and more locally rooted serves human flourishing kind of better than the one we have now in many ways.
But there’s a BIG challenge with this path. Path A also contains an incredibly dangerous Chaos Window for our most vulnerable populations. Why? Because these folks, they depend most heavily on the complexity of the current system and they have the least ability to opt out of it.
Think about someone who relies on a global pharmaceutical supply chain for life-saving medication or a family in a food desert whose grocery store depends entirely on long haul distribution or communities in the developing world whose economic progress has been built on participation in global trade. Local resilience is great if you have the resources and geography to build it. It’s a crisis if you don’t. And too many people don’t. This is why I prefer Path B.
Path B is what I call the On The Way To Star Trek Future. I have a deep love for Star Trek that somehow I haven’t talked about yet on this podcast. Star Trek is the most sophisticated version of optimistic futurism I’ve seen in pop culture. It doesn’t pretend the hard stuff didn’t happen. It assumes we got through a eugenics war, contact with other species, a post-money transition (all Fourth Turnings probably).
What makes this sci-fi remarkable is that Star Trek’s future requires far more complexity than we have now, but it works because they adopted an Organizing Story that provides for everyone’s basic needs. Path B gets us on the road to Star Trek sooner, so naturally this is my favorite one.
So what does Path B actually look like? Well, it starts with energy. Now remember the energy conundrum. Additional complexity requires additional energy, but producing more energy in the current way will kill our biosphere. It seems like we’re stuck, right? No, not necessarily. This trap kind of has a side door.
Our constraint isn’t energy production itself. It’s our current super old school methods of producing energy. And we already have better methods.
A solar panel installed today produces 50% more electricity and costs 90% less than a decade ago. Wind turbines installed today produce nearly five times the power of turbines from the late nineties. And they keep getting bigger and cheaper and more efficient every year. Great clean energy technology exists. It works. None of it is experimental. We don’t need to put a nuclear reactor on every corner. We don’t need fusion or hydrogen cars. We can do this with the technology we have.
And the constraint? It’s not money, either. To keep our global temperature rise under 2 degrees, the International Energy Agency puts the price tag at $4.5 trillion a year spent on clean energy investment. That sounds enormous. Until you know we’re already spending $7 trillion a year propping up the system that’s killing us. Seriously, that’s the full environmental cost of our current fossil fuel subsidies (including “externalities”). We are literally paying more to maintain the problem than it would cost to solve it.
The truth of Path B is this: if we use our Chaos Window to get the energy transition right, the ceiling for human civilization gets dramatically higher. Not just survivable… genuinely extraordinary.
This is energy so cheap it stops being a constraint. It’s A.I. coordinating supply chains at a level of sophistication no human institution could match. It’s a global economy organized around entirely different physics, not combustion — not the controlled explosion of ancient carbon — but sunlight and wind converted directly into work. No exhaust, no “debt” pumped into the atmosphere. This is a world that truly prepares the soil for our descendants to build something Star Trek worthy.
You all know I’m no tech bro hype machine. I’m just looking at the tech that’s currently available and saying, what if we had an Organizing Story that pushed us in a Star Trek direction? That is worth fighting for!
But here’s the challenge of Path B. As we’ve discussed, the constraint isn’t technology or money. It’s actually something more difficult: collective will and current incentives.
I don’t think we’re going to get to path B by convincing capitalists to become environmentalists. The “you can’t do business on a dead planet” argument fails on timeline because they believe their fiduciary duty is to quarterly earnings, not to 2075. So I think we need to make a better capitalist argument. Specifically: “Whoever builds the new energy infrastructure wins.”
Energy is the ultimate input cost for every business that exists. Control cheap, abundant, clean energy, and you get an oversized influence on the cost structure of the entire global economy for the next century. I think China understands this. And I think it’s why they installed 329 gigawatts of solar power in 2024 alone, more than the rest of the world combined. I don’t think that was environmentalism. I think it was the biggest competitive advantage play that we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Here in the U.S., we’re still doubling down on fossil fuels. Even if you only care about business and not the planet, this is a stupid and uncompetitive strategy.
So how do we get Path B going? History suggests Path B is gonna require a “catalyst moment,” a crisis or a competitive threat large enough to break our political paralysis and authorize mobilization scale investment. This is why I lean on the Fourth Turning so much. This kind of step change catalyst has happened before, many times. And it’s ready to happen again.
Before December 7, 1941, the US had the industrial capacity, the technology, the workforce to build a war machine. What it lacked was the collective will and incentives to do so. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed that overnight. Within two years, war production was 40% of our national economy.
So what could provide that kind of catalyst today? Obviously we don’t want to direct it toward war. We want to direct it toward clean energy. But the kindling for a catalyst moment like this right now is so dry, several things could ignite it. Let’s see if you could picture any of these things happening.
How about a global trade war that fractures our supply chains and makes the cost of fossil fuel dependence viscerally untenable?
How about an escalating Middle East conflict that spikes energy prices high enough to make the “cheap oil forever” assumption collapse?
How about an extreme weather event on a scale like we’ve never seen, like a category six hurricane that hits a major city?
We don’t know yet what spark is going to light this fire, but the conditions for ignition… they’re already here.
I won’t lie to you, even once this mobilization happens, the Chaos Window on Path B is still real and painful. There’s going to be workforce displacement as A.I. restructures the economy. We’ll have an Organizing Story evolution as the old growth and consumption narrative breaks fully. There’s the rather excruciating work of redesigning global institutions that are right now built for a completely different era.
Historical analogs tell us this path is probably 10-20 years for the full shift, with some acute chaos in the first 5-10. I will not minimize the painful parts of a transition like this. AND… if we are smart about it, if we prepare well and commit ourselves to helping those around us, I think we will find many opportunities for joy and even celebration in the midst of the difficulties of this transition. Our thoughtfulness now will also help determine how long the Chaos Window will be. Of course, shortening that window, that’s why we do this every week.
Before we close for today, I need to call out something that’s really important. We desperately need a new Organizing Story for humanity. An organizing story that only exists to create more capital is a story that will fail us all eventually, including the holders of capital. Furthermore, the current Story — grow, consume, compete, accumulate, privatize everything — is breaking. We feel it everywhere.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast planting seeds about idea for what could come next. But here’s what we haven’t really talked about yet until today: we can’t install a new Organizing Story in a dying biosphere. The new Story needs an alive world to take root in.
So what we’re doing right now, in this winter, in our Chaos Window, is survival and foundation work. We’re not planting the garden quite yet. Right now, we’re putting out the dang fire so we can plant anything. Redirecting capitalist energy toward clean infrastructure… that’s not the new Story, but it is clearing the ground so the new Story actually has somewhere to grow. It’s sequencing.
The new Organizing Story is what we’re building at Hello Tomorrow; this particular episode is about us surviving long enough to get there.
Here’s what I want to leave us all with. We are not watching history happen “to” us. We are in it. We are making choices right now, today, that will echo forward in ways we can’t yet fully see. Path Zero is only inevitable if we accept it. I refuse to accept it. I hope you do, too.
Our Optimistic Rebellion for this week has three options. I challenge you to pick one of these three and actually do it.
First option, if you want to fight for Path B with me, the Star Trek Future, find one place where your money is still funding the old system and move it. One investment, one utility choice, one purchasing decision. Capital follows signals. Be one of the signals. And if you’re a leader with real capital allocation authority, that conversation needs to happen in your next planning cycle, not “eventually” next cycle.
Second option, if you want to prepare for Path A, Simplification, have one real conversation with a neighbor that you don’t know well enough yet. Not small talk, a real conversation. Ask them what they’re good at. Borrow their lawnmower. Just kidding. But seriously, tell them what you’re good at. That’s it. Just start building the community infrastructure. That’s going to matter more than anything you can stockpile.
Option three, tend to your inner life. This is also a great choice, honestly might be the most important one. Sit quietly for 10 minutes tomorrow morning before you look at your phone. No agenda, just sit. The people who navigate the Chaos Window best, they won’t necessarily be the richest or the most prepared materially. They’ll be the ones who built enough inner stability that they don’t need the world to stay the same in order to be OK.
Refuse Path Zero. Fight for Path B, prepare for Path A, tend to your inner life, and remember, nothing about this is inevitable. The future is not something that happens to us. It’s something we design together.
Original post with all source links: https://joshallan.com/2026/03/10/the-future-either-sucks-or-its-star-trek-you-decide/
