You Don’t Have to Surface It
Futurism isn’t a label. It’s a relationship with time
Someone commented on a post I wrote about everyday futurism.
Today my mom told me she thinks in the present timeline and I in the future. my wonder/ideas brain is always seeing what's next. Does this mean I'm a futurist?
Yes. And also — welcome to the relationship dynamic I’ve never heard another futurist talk about:)
What her mother described wasn’t criticism, exactly. It was observation. One person’s attention is on what is. The other’s is on what could be. These are genuinely different cognitive orientations, and they produce a specific kind of friction that’s hard to name when you’re inside it.
The present-focused person often reads the future-focused person as naive. “That’s not how things work” is usually what it sounds like. And they’re not wrong that the future-focused person sometimes underweights existing constraints. Meanwhile, the future-focused person is quietly frustrated because they can see a better version of the system and still have to live inside the old one anyway. Nothing about having a clearer view of what’s possible exempts you from interacting with what exists.
The future is defined differently for everyone. It depends entirely on what you’re responsible for and how much of it you can actually influence.
An emergency room doctor is one of the most intensely future-oriented people but they are at a resolution most of us never operate at. Every decision is a projection: if I do this, then that. If I don’t move now, here’s what happens next. The window might be sixty seconds. It might be the first step in a recovery that takes months. Either way, the doctor is constantly running forward simulations under conditions where being wrong has immediate, visible consequences. That’s not present-thinking. That’s future-thinking compressed to its most urgent focal length.
The same doctor, walking out of the hospital at the end of a shift, might find it genuinely difficult to think about what their life looks like in five years. The daily practice of the job has trained their future-orientation to a specific distance. Zoom in that far for long enough and the wide angle becomes hard to access. The skill is real. The focal length is just fixed.
This is true across most work. A trader is thinking seconds ahead. A project manager is thinking quarters ahead. An urban planner is thinking decades ahead. None of them would necessarily call themselves futurists. All of them are practicing future-orientation at the resolution their context demands.
Which means the mother’s observation — you live in the future, I live in the present — is probably less about orientation and more about focal length. And focal length is shaped by context, by profession, by what you’ve been trained to be responsible for.
Here’s the part I think gets undersold: everyday futurism is already everywhere. It’s just not labeled. The couple who builds a wedding registry for a life that doesn’t exist yet — that’s future orientation. The person who starts divorce paperwork before they’re ready to tell anyone — that’s future orientation. The parent who opens an RESP the week the kid comes home from the hospital. The label never entered into it. The relationship with time was already doing the work.
The question of whether to claim the identity publicly is separate from whether you practice it. I say I’m a futurist in my work because it’s accurate and because my work lives in that territory. But in a lot of regular conversations I just say “writer,” and it’s not because I’m hedging. It’s because the response to “writer” tells me almost everything I need to know before I decide whether to go further. Do they get curious or dismissive? Do they ask what you write or what you make from it? Do they light up or get slightly uncomfortable because they always meant to write something themselves? Or does it lead to an AI rabbit hole about how writing is dead?
“Futurist” skips that entirely. It arrives pre-loaded — techno-optimism, TED talks, disruption culture, AI — and suddenly you’re managing their version of the word before you’ve described your actual work. You’re not having a conversation. You’re doing triage on their assumptions. And depending on the room, that triage can take a while. How much time do you really want to spend talking about flying cars and The Jetsons?
So “I just say writer” is the more deliberate move. It’s a way of reading the room before you decide what to put in it. And depending on what you find, you either go further or you don’t. Not every relationship is structured to absorb the gap between your perspective and someone else’s, and you don’t have to force it.
Some of what keeps me calibrated happens in places nobody sees. I integrate meditation into my walks rather than separating it out as its own dedicated thing. No cushion, no streak, nothing visible to anyone else. But I want to be precise about what I mean by calibrated, because it’s not primarily about emotional regulation. That’s a real byproduct and I notice the difference when I’m doing it consistently versus when I’m not.
The practice is fundamentally about noticing. What’s actually changing and what isn’t. What’s predictable and what’s genuinely uncertain. What’s moving fast and what’s moving so slowly it only looks stable. Not everything requires a futures lens. Some things are load-bearing precisely because they don’t change, and treating them as if they might is its own kind of error.
The pace of change matters as much as the fact of change. Climate change and evolution are both real. One is accelerating faster than human systems can adapt to. The other moves so slowly it’s functionally invisible within a human lifetime. Confusing the two — treating slow change as urgent, or urgent change as inevitable and therefore untouchable — is where a lot of futures thinking goes wrong. The noticing practice is what keeps the focal length honest. It’s a continuous low-level audit: what’s the actual rate of change here, what horizon does this problem require me to scan, what am I treating as new that’s actually ancient, what am I treating as permanent that’s already shifting.
Meditation works for me because it’s grounded in science and I notice how it affects my thinking. But the underlying capacity — something that keeps you accurately oriented to what’s stable and what’s in motion — doesn’t have a single form. Running, cooking, a weekly conversation with someone who only talks about what’s happening right now. The form is less important than the function. What you’re looking for is something that returns you to an accurate reading of the present reliably enough that the future doesn’t become the only place you live.
Neither practice requires a label.
Your relationship with time is not a credential. It’s a characteristic. How you think about time, which horizons you naturally scan, which futures you’re already living inside before anyone else has noticed them — that’s not a job title you apply for. It’s just who you are. The label is available whenever it’s useful and something you can drop when it isn’t.
Which is maybe the thing worth saying to the woman who commented — the one whose mom had clocked her relationship with time before she had language for it. Her mom is right that she’s thinking from the future. That’s real. And also — she gets to decide if and when to disclose and how much of the gap between her perspective and someone else’s she wants to spend her energy bridging on any given day.
A futurist orientation doesn’t require an audience. It was already hers before she had a word for it. Sharing it is generous. Guarding it is understandable. Like nurturing a candle flame against the wind.