Perspectives

I find myself torn between a view of humanity as just another plague upon the surface of the earth - threatening to eat itself out of a habitat - and as a marvelous complex blend of intellect and emotion whose every achievement is worthy of exploration and analysis.

A marvelously complex over-achieving little plague of humans?

I don't think you can divorce study of our stellar progress and finer feelings from the fact that just like rats, locusts and fleas, we seem doomed to compete and starve ourselves into a more sustainable relationship with the earth.

Not many finer feelings there.

Under that scenario, the 'fittest' who would perhaps survive a population crunch of the one we're heading for would also be the most aggressive people, or those who can survive on the least amount of food and water and outlast the others. GI Joe and Anorexic Barbie?

The reality is that the rate of growth of our population is as much about the growth of the length of a single life as it is about the number of children we have.

If the average lifespan is 30 years rather than 70 or 80, the rate of population growth is massively lower-  because there's really only two generations around at any one time. Contrast this with our population where the fastest growing demographic is 85 plus - that means  four or even five generations alive at once, all burning fossil fuels and drinking fresh water.

It's just like compound interest really. 

Beginning

I'm setting up this blog, not just for now but for my future life. 12 years running my own firm has left me fulfilled on many levels - and yet not.

I've been a social trends researcher for many years - long enough for some of my earlier predictions to be tested by reality.

In 1997 I predicted that by 2007 we'd be carrying all our books in a single digital reader - while it was the shape of a laptop or a kindle or an iPad, it was way fatter - completely missed the whole move to slim lines.

And I predicted to a postal organisation that the last personal letter would be sent by post in 2017. . . so that one's on track, at least in this country.

Adding it all up I do better than the 20% hit rate that is apparently normal for prediction, but the fact remains that prediction is hard and ultimately silly because most of us just look at a prediction and go - hmmh.

There's probably less than a thousand people in the world that can actually use a prediction properly - to design products or services to come on stream in the future. And most of them don't really need any help.

What my social trends research has left me with is a clear understanding of how people operate. So I've found it increasingly easy to say things like: people aren't like that / this isn't going back to how it was / cycles are usually actually spirals .. and stuff like that.

So I hope to be able to use that skill to help people to ground today's decisions in the realities of human nature.