How does a futurist look at his or her own life?
It’s very strange to turn 59, which I did last week. That’s a largely unremarkable thing, since aetat. 59 doesn’t count as an obvious milestone, like 50 or 65. Accordingly, I wrote this post in a typical set of days crammed with work and routines without a pause or rupture to mark the event.
It’s doubly strange to write about as I’ve long found it awkward to speak about myself. It might be a generational thing, where we Xers react against the epically autobiographical Boomers. To me writing about my life also feels like a misfocus of attention, as there are topics beyond my life that I find vastly more important and interesting. Writing about myself feels self-indulgent and egotistical. Yet intellectually I know that autobiography and memoir have some value for people. And some folks have said that like this kind of writing from me. So I keep practicing. Looking ahead, maybe this post can serve as a useful snippet of a time, a glimpse into the year 2026.
I’ve attempted this birthdayblogging before, usually a bit of reflection, some memoir, and a touch of futuring. Let’s try it again. (Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2018, 2017)
When people ask me about how my life is going my instinct is to speak of my family. I proudly proclaim that my wife survived two (2) heart attacks and is developing a fascinating AI technique. I tell people that my adult (!) children are healthy and productive. (It’s still weird to think how old they are.)
My other impulse is to talk about professional matters. Here I can claim some progress. My strange, cobbled-together career as a futurist keeps thrumming along and advancing. My newest book, Peak Higher Ed, came out last month, culminating a long-running research and futures scenario. I adore writing books and am now working on two more. Meanwhile, colleges, universities, associations, nonprofits, businesses, and governments around the world regularly ask me to speak or consult. Georgetown University still lets me teach in their Learning, Design, and Technology program. The Future Trends Forum, the video program I launched way back in 2016, celebrated its ten year anniversary of holding hundreds of regular, weekly programs. Nearly 10,000 people are in our community, and they make each episode work. There is, in fact, much to kvell about.
Over the past year one research topic loomed larger than everything. Some readers, viewers, and listeners know I track nearly 100 trends reshaping higher education. I try to present on that whole range wherever I can. But AI has been overwhelmingly what people want to hear and talk about. By “people” I mean faculty, staff, publishers, senior administrators, government officials, nonprofit officers, and journalists. “Yes yes,” they say politely, “demographics and college finance and the polycrisis are all interesting but will AI throw us out of work/kill us all/die in an epic bubble/etc.?” Accordingly I’ve been devoting more time to AI, between teaching a Georgetown seminar on its impacts on higher ed to speaking about it to writing more on this Substack.
(The opposite reception greets climate change. At risk of generalization, within the academy global warming interest has collapsed, notably in the United States. The topic appears nearly nowhere, from publications to conferences, social media, and informal conversation. My sense is that this echoes the American Democratic party’s walking away from the topic. I, showing a chronic inability to read the room, keep on with it. I write and speak about climate change, despite some friends and colleagues advising me not to. I network with the small group of brilliant, energetic academics who persist in working on the topic. My bet, my conviction, is that global warming remains the vast civilizational crisis we must meet and I remain committed to that in my professional and personal lives.)
Very happy with this Poe t-shirt.
So much for professional work. Now for other work. Over the past year I’ve increased my physical fitness efforts. In non-icy weather I bike around three times a week, either through the neighborhoods and local park or to do errands to a library, grocery store, pharmacy, and so on, aiming for up to 10 miles at a time. I also biked to the gym, where I’ve been ramping up my workouts. Now I skip the bike and drive my wife and I to the gym 6-7 times each week. There I use a stationary bike, then hit the machines to work on my legs, gut, chest, and arms. Progress has happened. I managed to work myself back up to bench pressing 300. My weight remains stable at around 220; hopefully this means I’m burning fat and adding muscle.
This all feels good – well, afterwards – and impresses my primary care physician. The combo of biking and weight training is also good for the body as it ages up. One friend told me the 70-year-old version of me with be grateful for this effort. Here’s hoping.
In other disgustingly healthy news I remain committed to the vegan diet, trying out new recipes every other week. I still avoid alcohol and caffeine. On this score, too, my physician is delighted. Hopefully my elder self will be similarly pleased. In all honestly, every day of health is one I’m thankful for. It feels good to have some strength and stamina. It’s also vital that I have the physical capacity to keep working.
One visible sign of decay is that my eyes grow weaker, at least in the short range. I can only read with glasses now. Years of fine ocular health mean it’s not easy to remember to carry glasses, and I often resort clumsily to using my phone. The phone also saves my reading through ebooks, which I increasingly prefer to print ones, despite the thousands of the latter in my library, because I can embiggen text. To cheer myself up on this score I think of myself as a vision cyborg. I do know it’ll get worse. More ocular tech and/or some surgery await me down the road.
On the mental side… on the one hand, I’m wracked by stress. The crisis afflicting academia is what I study now, and it presents all kinds of anxieties to me as I dread what’s happening to beloved institutions and cherished colleagues. It hits me personally as well. Regularly I scramble to head off potential, downstream threats to my livelihood – which gets harder to talk about in the open. Again, as an independent academic lacking tenure or family funding my status is quite fragile. Looking ahead I dread what might happen to Social Security and Medicare due to American politics, as well as what might occur to what little I’ve managed to put ahead towards a retirement which seems ever more unlikely to occur. Hence my 60-70-hour work weeks.
I know I it will become harder to do that schedule as I hit my seventh decade. Every year I vow to redesign my schedule. Every year the needs roar in and demand my days. I don’t yet see a way to do less – which might end up being my final words.
A good deal of this stress is political, of course. The second Trump administration has clobbered the world and academia in all kinds of ways, which I’ve tried to document in this video series and so don’t need to repeat here. I hear from campus architects, student life administrators, presidents, health staff, faculty, librarians, state government officials, and others about the many ways the federal government and also some state administrations are whipsawing the academic world. Personally, I’m trying to do what I can, between making those videos, writing and speaking about the political crisis, volunteering with a local climate group, joining demonstrations, meeting with state politicians, and doing some social media stuff. I try to protect my students and family above all – and, once again, there are limits to what I can say in public. When geopolitics hits home risks explode.
And there are risks here. I sometimes travel to other countries to speak or consult, and dread every time that US Customs will stop me at the border. As you can see, it’s easy to find my political attitudes online. I worry, too, about losing professional work for political reasons. There are some conservative academics, yes, but more a large chunk of the academy who fears sticking their neck out lest it gets chopped, and so don’t want me to draw attention to them. Multiple times over the past year I’ve negotiated with hosts about what I could or should not say. I always strive to be analytical, which seems to work in most situations. At the same time I sometimes get grief from other academics who think I’m not doing enough, am too critical of Democrats, or am not sufficiently opposed to the GOP. I remember reading one historian’s introduction to a book he wrote in the late 1980s, where he apologized for falling silent over some years because he’d been so politically active (against nuclear weapons, I think). I wish I could embrace that kind of commitment but do not have the privilege.
On the other side of the mental question, I find myself increasingly astonished and delighted at the sheer presence of most of the world and its people. Both the human-built environment and the non-human environment soak up my attention and appreciation in an almost embarrassing way. I marvel at buildings and cities, obsessively photograph rivers and plants. Spending time thinking about existential threats sharpens the world’s value for me.
The sheer presence of other people strikes me as marvelous. I’m much more concerned about other folks’ health and safety than I ever have been, perhaps because I’ve lost too many friends over the past decade and also lived through a global pandemic which killed millions, or because there are health and emergency services people in my family. I think of my dead friends nearly daily. They appear in different circumstances. I want to tell one about a book I just read, or hear another teasing me about not lifting harder, or think of a third when I bake a certain bread. The ghosts are with me, if you like, a benign crowd, a penumbra of memories.
Now I try to attend to living people much more. I attempt to be more open to their lives than to my own, practicing listening to their stories rather than telling mine. In doing so I seek to reduce my ego in their presence, clearing space for them to express themselves. I do this in my teaching, in presentations, in conversations, interviews, and meeting people. It’s easy for me to get my thoughts out, as an extrovert who’s built several platforms. It’s more and more rewarding work to make openings for others. And it makes me happy to do so.
One downside is that it leaves me more open than I should be to slights and attacks. In grad school one of my professors gave a talk to a room full of people. Out of the roughly 100 there 99 applauded enthusiastically, but one was very opposed to the talk. My professor was grateful but deeply concerned about the singular critic. I find myself in a similar position, taking opposition obsessively to heart.
I don’t know to what extent all of this is typical for someone at age 59. I don’t know how to slice that question for someone of my age, gender, sexuality, economic status, religion, geographical location, politics, and so on. A few behaviors I hear about from the <>60 years old population feel congenial to me, like increasingly loving and caring for my family and friends. I confess to losing track of current music and fashion, although I make a point of not just listening to music I listened to as a teenager. Many popular descriptions of aging seem foreign to me, like a sense of one’s life slowing down, or feeling a decreasing concern for what other people think of me. None of that makes any sense. I definitely don’t feel like I’m in a glide path to retirement.
All of this, all of the preceding is the setting for pushing on to age 60, a true milestone I really have a hard time imagining. The contours of work and health are easier to think about. As ever, I want to do more. I want to keep learning. I need to improve my language skills, both the ones I’ve studied before (French, Russian) and ones I’m attempting now (Spanish, Chinese). Two new book projects are on deck, one about technology and one on the future. I want to improve my video production enterprise with more interesting editing and more output. AI looms over all, sometimes, and I really want to be able to better grapple with it in my futures work.
I began this post by mentioning futures thinking and also a lack of sudden change, and these two thoughts are in some friction with each other. The future often occurs through rapid change, transformation, and rupture, and this post has ignored those possibilities in favor of continuities. Let’s close by being open to those options of sudden switches. All kinds of them are on the table. I’m old and tired enough that a stroke or heart attack wouldn’t be implausible, nor a cancer to appear, my good health aside. All kinds of accidents could claim me health or life. I have to look hard at these possibilities, and have prepared for some by insurance, yet changes in medical insurance can devastate a family. There are also sudden positive developments which could advance or comfort my life – new technologies, new financial support, a political transformation for the better.
Other accidents are possible. My professional life could implode if I make a terrible mistake or get hit by an attack political or otherwise. Meso- and macro-level developments can strike, and those I’m more familiar with: political chaos, economic disruption, a technological crisis, or a true black swan/wild card event. This life could be knocked sideways at any point. The road to 60 and beyond is not a single, smooth route, but a careening flight through a crazed landscape.
(Deep breath) OK, that’s enough memoir-ification for now. This is too long. Besides, I’ve got a series of posts about a different topic I need to set in motion.
Meanwhile, I hope to keep my health going. I hope it’s good enough that I can keep working hard and making a difference. More, I want my family and friends to be safe. I want more life, like Roy Baty says, and in it I want to get more done. I hope I can help us through this dark, wild time.
Onward.
(59 photos by duncan cumming, Jerolek)
