Project Vision 21

The rapid, inevitable, profound, irreversible, and unsolicited social and technological changes of today’s world seem to indicate that we have disconnected from the future. As a result, we forget the past and cling to a present as distressing as the reality surrounding us—or so says an influential Spanish writer and thinker.

"Never before has the present been so disconnected from the future. In the past, the future offered more guarantees of continuity, but today the question of the future is agonizing," Francisco Jarauta recently stated.

I believe one of the reasons for this is that we are not preparing for a future that is no longer a continuation of the past nor a repetition of the present. And it’s not because we lack the ability to prepare for ongoing disruptions, but because we’ve simply stopped playing seriously. For this very reason, we have abandoned thinking.

In his early childhood, my son and his peers would spend entire afternoons playing. I often observed that, regardless of the game, someone would propose changing the rules, leading to three basic responses: accepting the changes and continuing to play, rejecting the changes and creating conflict, or proposing modifications to the new rules.

It took me many years to understand that this rule-changing in children’s games was a way of preparing for a future in which, for whatever reasons, any of those children—by then adults—might face unforeseen circumstances, forcing them to accept or reject new realities, or to promote new changes.

In other words, those childhood games, far from being frivolous ways to pass the time, were meaningful activities that combined budding interpersonal relationships with moments of exploration, creativity, and experimentation. This fostered personal growth and even cognitive transformation.

This situation is what Dr. John Vervaeke from the University of Toronto calls "serious play." It refers to a process in which a dynamic relationship emerges between the current structure and spontaneous innovation, allowing one to explore the new while simultaneously standing on the firm ground of past experience.

In childhood, we engage in children’s games. In adulthood, serious play includes practices from wisdom traditions, sciences, and states of consciousness beyond the surface-level awareness of daily life. One such serious play that integrates imagination, critical thinking, and intuition is philosophy.

When we stop playing seriously, philosophy (and everything in life) becomes a matter of tradition and dogma. That’s why Nietzsche spoke (in Beyond Good and Evil, 211) of those "philosophers of the future" who possess the ability to break free from the frameworks and values of their own time.

According to Nietzsche, all philosophy is a philosophy of the future. Nietzsche emphasized the idea that philosophy is forward-looking, shaping and influencing the future through its critique of contemporary values, systems, and thought.

Nietzsche often portrayed philosophers as those who pave the way for new ways of thinking, challenging stagnant traditions to create frameworks for humanity's progress. Thus, disconnected from the future and from thinking, we are left with nothing but anguish or escapism.