Facing the Future

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My secure software development course got done a week early with required content, so I needed to invent a lesson that would entice soon-to-graduate seniors to show up for one more class session, despite the fact that the content for that session would have no implications for grades, graduation, etc. (Learning for its own sake - what an idea!). These students are very busy finishing other classes and/or holding down jobs, so I wanted the most value-added content possible. What I came up with was the theme of “Facing the Future” Subtext - after graduation - now what?

Here I just want to put a brief outline of how that topic is being addressed. This is turning into a passion project for me, and it looks like next week’s lesson is going to become a sort of dress rehearsal for larger presentations or publications in future cycles. I’d love any input here that might be helpful for next week’s class!

Facing the Future: What Happens After Graduation?

Ikigai-based approach:

  • what does the world need?
  • what are you good at?
  • what do you love?
  • what can you get paid for?

On the question of what the world needs, this requires a world view or a theory of which way the world is going and why. A few basic options:

  • capitalism is great: all essential future values are priced into current markets.
  • capitalism is incomplete: other values (environmental, relational, philosophical, spiritual) must be added to purely financial calculations.
  • capitalism must be replaced. The correct answer to “what can you get paid for?” is no one should seek pay at all. We should all be living in co-ops or something communal and shared.

On the question what are you good at? I don’t have a lot of original content. Mostly I just linked to self-assessments like these: Career Assessment Tools | It's Your Yale I do have one somewhat original idea that may be of interest here, however. Over the years in thinking about Spiral Dynamics and related stage theories, I’ve grown to favor thinking of these stages as bundles of skills and behaviors, more than bundles of values and ideas. Modernity or post-modernity are more things people do, not so much the way they view the world. Or, alternatively, perhaps the thinking is fundamentally influenced by the doing.

The question of “what do you love”? is potentially vast. My immediate concern with my target audience of a computer science graduating class was to put psychology and humanistic values on the table in an elegant way that would not require elaborate detours into the humanities in general. (They can take those journeys later - I hope they do!) The article linked below is the one I went with:

It strikes me this is a first stab at the question of, what is an essential psychological theory for social change and personal values alignment? The idea is to get just enough psychology to be useful, while allowing students to also focus on other professions. I’m currently using UTOK with heavy infusions of Vervaeke and McGilchrist, but I’d be curious if others can identify other psychologies or schools of thought as potentially essential for students in general.

On the final question of what students can get paid for, my main advice to students was to supplement job boards and Internet search with as much face-to-face, relational discussion as possible with people already in a profession or industry that seems attractive. I’m a veteran of the meet-up scene, and I strongly suggest job-seeking students to leverage meet-ups. Old, but true: “It’s who you know as much as what you know.”

That’s a lot, but I’m starting to think it’s all an essential package for world-navigation and personal values discovery and articulation. My prior counseling of students was mostly just about what the hot programming languages were, taking a late-capitalist, programmers-always-get-paid, framework as implicit assumptions. 2025 is casting considerable doubt on those implicit assumptions.

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Great topic @RobertBunge ! In my treatment of, not ordinary ikigai but collective ikigai I replaced “what can you get paid for?” with “what can be resourced?” which you could modify for individuals to something like “will this bring me the resources I need?”

Following my ontological commoning thread, I would find it really interesting to give students a “history of the future” task — some question like “It’s now 2035, and you’ve found an occupation that meets your ikigai criteria. Tell the story of how you got that job, and how it fulfills each of your ikigai criteria.” Or something! Then (as in the evolving ontological commoning methodology) trace through the beliefs underlying that story, and the underlying view of reality, which then meets up well with your ideas around “theory of which way the world is going and why”.

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Collective Ikigai is a good idea. My spin is a bit different, because I wanted a very stripped-down, minimalist model, specifically for situations of collective chaos: Chaos Compass: Career Navigation for Turbulent Times | by Robert Bunge | Medium
To get there, I let go of all the Ikigai Venn diagram subtlety and just went with the four key questions. Of these, of course, “what can you get paid for?” rings false for organizations that aspire to post-growth, post-capitalism, spiritual purpose, pro-social, etc. If reflection on the question “what the world needs” results in non-monetary objectives, then my recommendation for individuals or collectives is to tweak the idea of “get paid” into the notion of “get results”. In other words, will our intended actions produce the outcomes we are intending? That question overlaps quite a bit with what Effective Altruism claims to be doing, or what A path from Effective Altruism to Second Renaissance (Pragmatic Utopianism) may be be doing better than EA can.

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I just now cross-posted this to my LMS for the Facing the Future lesson. It will be interesting to see if any students take up the challenge!

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Great, thanks @RobertBunge … my main point there was just to offer an alternative to “what can you get paid for?” which I agree does suggest rather mainstream assumptions, about money, employment, etc.

I’m fine with

  • what does the world need?
  • what are you good at?
  • what do you love?

and then, instead of “what can you get paid for?” something like one of these:

  • what provides you with a living? (and let’s look at what “a living” might mean)
  • what can be resourced? (a wider perspective than just the individual)
  • will this bring you the basic resources you need to live?

Just “get results” doesn’t do the trick for me, because it seems to leave out the dimension of personal needs and self-care. Seems to me too close to what the world needs.

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After writing Chaos Compass, I shared it with my dean and walked her through a collective version on behalf of our school. Went like this:

What do we love? DEI
What are we good at? DEI
What does the world need? DEI
What can our school get paid for? NOT DEI!

Our college district faces a massive budget deficit. So does our state. Meanwhile, all federal DEI funding has been cut off. That spells massive layoffs and program closures. So that bit about revenue generation is not exactly trivial.

The non-profit sector, in general, is not immune to the need for funding. If “getting paid” sounds too acquisitive, how about “attracting funding”? All those bio-regional finance workshops seem pretty focused on that, for example.

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Great to know the context of this, thank you @RobertBunge

Totally see your point at an institutional non-profit level. I was thinking first at an individual level, where people can sometimes be supported within a group by doing unpaid work that is needed and appreciated. Caring work has often fallen into this category, naturally.

Non-profits may be dependent on external funding, but equally that’s not necessarily true. I find it very sad when non-profits don’t have any commercial income streams and are then completely at the mercy of government funding. And also so sad when any organisation needs to charge money to survive when their morality would prefer to give for free.

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Here is an article I wrote awhile back on alternative economics, with quite a few of the theorists summarized being women.

One theme is that traditional womens’ roles, although being essential to species survival, have only lately tended to be compensated in cash, and even then, not at average high rates. If one analyzes the work that needs done in total, quite a bit of it falls outside the cash economy.

Flip that around a bit, and it seems a myopic focus on financial capital and monetary gains overlooks all sorts of value from nature, relationships, social arrangements, personal growth, and so on. To assimilate these many dimensions to economic thinking, I favor the theory of “multicapital”.

If we view the Ikigai question in multicapital terms, the question of how to get “paid” is less problematic. Perhaps a rephrasing such as “how to obtain value from work”. Such value could involve material support, or relational improvement, or knowledge gains, or plant or animal cultivation, or many other dimensions.

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This was my entire lesson plan for final class of the year last night. Worked great! In the room, the conversations flowed very much like an Intentional Society meeting. Some small groups, some turn-taking around the room, some popcorn style, a little this and a little that. Structurally, we turned the wheel clockwise from “love” to “pay”.

Behind this was about 10 pages of LMS content that was, among other things, a beginner’s guide to the metacrisis. So this two-hour class became tremendously rich for exploring alternative values alignments and what sort of practical opportunities await the graduating class of 2025.

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Really like the theme Robert. I think an emphasis on practicality is very welcome both for them and as an invitation for “us” to reflect on how to make the second renaissance and metacrisis ideas as concrete as possible.

One interesting exercise could be a moment of future-casting: imagine america 30y from now (not starting from today). And then try to work back. This could get people thinking about how different the world could be …

And lovely to see what you did.

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Thanks @rufuspollock . This response is going to set up an additional response to this other thread (What would you spend a billion dollars on? (to advance the Second Renaissance)), because before my proposal to spend $1 billion, it strikes me as desirable to have a change theory and a change process somewhat worked out.

As I shared with the class last night, the whole Ikigai workshop model occurred to me on snowshoes, on a mountain hike, a couple weeks into the current Trump administration, as a personal answer to “what does the world need?”, and more specifically, “what does the world need from me?”. The problem I was struggling with was how to pivot away from extended metatheory debates (with one 2 hour YouTube after the other), to an action program ordinary people can understand without needing the equivalent of a graduate degree or more. The “ah ha” moment was when I realized all the metatheory in the world can be subsumed by the question “what does the world need?”. Moreover, it’s not especially important that we all have unified views on “what the world needs”. All that is required is that any given person have a perspectival reference frame on what the world needs, undertakes some exploratory action from that POV, and then refines both the reference frame and action program based on feedback from results. This creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement . My hypothesis is that world views will converge at some point as horizons expand, but we don’t need a fully worked out world-theory to get started, we just need to get started. So my $1 billion proposal will be to fund taking that process to scale. More in the relevant thread …

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So much in this thread to think about! I had kinda dismissed the ikigai idea, because it initially appeared to one of those meme-type online wisdom hacks. However I read ( somewhere) an article that looked in greater detail at ikigai as it is understood in Japanese culture. I think the famous western Ikigai Venn diagram does the idea a disservice, by suggesting that ikigai only exists at the centre, and making “being paid” an essential part. It makes ikigai yet another goal-oriented pressure. I would prefer to see a larger more blurry zone at the centre. We have to be allowed to do dull or difficult jobs sometimes, our society needs that. Life is not all about individualism. That’s why I liked the idea of collective ikigai.

I’m doing some deep enquiry about how our consciousness might interact with time in a three dimensional, orthogonal way: time one being the impulse of individual behaviour, time two being relational, and time three the mythical deep time. It suddenly occurred to me that there may be a 3D ikigai “shape”, a zone of positive resonance, and a dynamic social morphogen towards thriving life itself.

Conceptually I’m imagining a flexi blurry jelly shape, swelling, pulsing and wobbling with a glowing radiant core of “persistent goodness”. If we can get ourselves and enough other humans to vibrate somewhere within that zone, life will be good.

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Hack - yes - absolutely! But in my process, it’s a discussion-starting device. Whether the resulting conversation results in wisdom or absurdity depends more on the skill of the players, not so much the layout of the game.

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Sounds like Gebser. That’s a complement. I’m so over linear time. Cosmic harmonies are temporally polyphonic. Feel the layers!

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A couple of years ago I took a deep dive into the ikigai ideas, coming up with a pair of posts: 2021-11-30 Collective ikigai and 2021-12-10 Ikigai through collective — I give links to people pointing out that the 4 circle diagram is not the same as the authentic Japanese ikigai.

Mark Winn, the one who put the word “ikigai” into that 4-circle diagram, is very aware of all the argument around it. To address your point, I replaced the idea of being “paid” with “what can be resourced”, pointing to the fact that we need to survive one way or another, and “resources” is one way of talking about what we need to survive, which is at least broader than financial.

Perhaps more importantly, I bring in the whole idea of the collective into the ikigai picture; and for me it both clarifies and makes things more realistic.

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Thanks @Asimong!

My Ikigai-insprired model is starting to take on a life of its own, with key ideas being rendering into software. Here is one screen of a personal-level dashboard:

The first pilot use of this will be in my fall IT classes. It will be used for student self-guidance and peer-to-peer guidance for career planning.

The company behind this has a much larger vision more consistent with generalized, systems-level pro-social, which could be viewed as collective Ikigai, among other things. Here is an example of the larger vision:

I requested the individual Ikigai dashboard first, because it’s the easiest thing to pilot and immediately relatable to students with no prior theoretical background. However, from personal takes on “what the world needs” the transition to more collective thinking seems very natural.

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If Western Society continues to function under late stage capitalism, I’m sure this would be really helpful for our young to find a career.

However given the gravity of impending collapse of economic and social systems I’m not sure something that gestures towards job markets is Ikigai at all. There will be no jobs for them, Ikigai or no. We are going off the cliff edge.

The world needs many things that are not tied to economic factors. Peace, compassion and soil quality and biodiversity being some key elements.

We need to love our planet, love life and love each other. Ikigai can illuminate a fittedness into the natural and social ecology. We should be teaching our young how to thrive in a low fossil fuel economy, how to grow food, be at peace, have joy, make art.

Life itself does not need jobs, that is an artificial artefact of collapsing modernity.

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My current use of Ikigai grew out of 10+ years of advising sessions with adult learners. For a great many of these advisees, the only question they really cared about was “what can they get paid for?” Going to an Ikigai-based model is an approach to broadening the discussion. As to whether or not the students want to get paid, however, there is no doubt. Like any professional/technical program, job skills development is the entire mission of the program I teach in, with successful career outcomes being a key success metric for the program. Thanks to the Ikigai-based approach, pro-social or non-monetized career options can at least be mentioned now.

As to what is the essence of Ikigai, it’s a thousand-year old Japanese concept that has persisted through a variety of social systems. Social collapse in the 21st century may well revert societies the world over to something not dissimilar to medieval Japan. It’s not clear why needing to earn a living will no longer be a relevant concern in that version of the world, however. Medieval Japanese had a keen interest in not starving to death, which appears to be a human universal of sorts.

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This distinction between being “paid” and what could be called “resouced” is something I’m keen to see clarified. Maybe being paid is seen as something that happens within the existing (fiat currency, neo-liberal, etc.) economy, but obviously this is not the only way to thrive. Huge numbers of people have been thriving without earning money, throughout all ages. Young children for one case. My question would be, what can you be doing that plays enough of a recognised role in society that people want to give or share with you the resources needed for survival and thriving?

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It’s interesting that so many people react to the verb “paid” as if money were a passing fad or a very recent development or something that is easily dispensed with. From a historical standpoint, by contrast, money seems coextensive with civilization itself:

In Japan, money in various forms predates the Heian period:

Notice that the “gai” part of “ikigai” - refers to value or purpose, but the root word is “kai”, which was a type of shell especially prized in the Heian.

https://www.keiro.org/fact-sheet/ikigai

Anyway, a collapse scenario that eliminates trade or barter in any medium whatsoever would be a quasi extinction event, not something that can be readily adjusted to with any degree of advanced planning.

Looking more to the brighter side of future potentials, the historical structuralists and futurists who marshal the evidence I find most convincing (Kojin Karatani, Peter Pogany) do envision a transformation or transcendence of the current global financial system, but not through reversion to pre-civilization. More like the emergence of new global governance structures to align the money economy with the real economy, which in turn must align with regeneratable underlying resources. Michel Bauwens, for one example, writes a lot about all this in relation to “commons” or “P-t-P”. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/2e3f561d-b1f5-4e7c-8da3-ccab0f00501d/UWP-033-REVISED.pdf

Anyway, for anyone allergic to capitalism, I would recommend a life purpose aligned with inventing the next thing. Meanwhile, figuring out how to keep a roof over one’s head under the current system is generally advised.