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The future arrived and we look in the opposite direction

Recently, a young man told me he was looking for a job and asked me to inform him if I knew of any opportunities in his area of interest. Shortly after, an opportunity arose and I immediately shared it with him, only to find out days later that he had not accepted it.

I asked him why he had rejected the opportunity and his answer was clear. "I do not want to work all day in a basement talking on the phone and listening to people's problems." The argument, although acceptable, had a big problem: it wasn’t base on reality.

The job I had was him was at a large, bright office in a commercial building with easy access and ample parking. It was not a basement. And the job was to make community education presentations, not listen to problems over the phone.

I asked the young man why he had come to such a conclusion with no based on reality and he told me that some years ago he had looked for work in a similar organization and that the initial interview was in a basement where there were people answering phone calls.

Perhaps that experience was so traumatic or memorable that the only option for this man was to cling to it and project it into the future and the present at every possible opportunity, assuming (erroneously) that what happened in the past would serve him to understand the future and decide his actions on that basis.

But when that future came and it was not what he expected, instead of changing his expectations and his way of understanding, instead of opening his mind and heart to other possibilities, this man locked himself inside his belief and, as a consequence, he was trapped in his past, unable to enter the future.

Let's be honest: we are all in that same situation. We cling to a past, even if it is imaginary and nostalgic, and, for that reason, we are unable to see the future and, as a consequence, we can’t create a mental map of the new future.

For example, in recent days, stories were published about the creation of "liquid metals" (in the best Terminator style), personal intelligent robots, photographs of quantum entanglement, and progress in the connection between human brains and intelligent machines (Neurolink, ofElon Musk.)

In addition, commercial trips to space are getting closer, there are already smart glasses that "know" what they have around them and store that information, and robot-musicians and robot-painters are being hired as replacements for humans, and they even win prizes previously reserved only for humans.

If we don’t understand what all that means, it is because we still live locked inside our own mental, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual basement, where, either through fear or narcissism, we only see and believe the fantasies that we created ourselves.

Meanwhile, the new future has arrived, and we, as the man in history did, rejected it because it doesn’t fit what we believed.

 

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