Bryan Johnson argues that humans struggle to imagine novel futures because we model existing examples, and our brains are wired to prioritize immediate concerns over days and years ahead. When we try to envision the future, we default to dystopian scenarios instead of positive possibilities.
We create goals and aspirations in life based upon things we can model out. We can see other people do it, and we then want to do it. It's very hard to model out something brand new that's never been done or never been experienced or never been talked about or doesn't have words to it. It's very hard to imagine those kinds of things. And so it's a problem of articulating this aspiration. It's a problem of getting people to also share in the aspiration. It's more of this emergent feeling that things could be better in unknown ways. And typically, when people get into that kind of thought process and they imagine what the future could be like, minds drift to dystopias in a fraction of a second. It's oftentimes challenging because the immediacy of human concerns is typically in the realm of seconds, then minutes, and then hours. But then once you get to days, the level of interest just kind of falls off a cliff in terms of what's immediately important to people. And that's just how we're biologically configured. It's how society is configured.
