{"slug":"building-the-future","title":"Building the future","date":"2026-06-15T13:03:10.746Z","excerpt":"","tags":["invention"],"order":84,"published":true,"content":"

Here's the revised version — \"I\" removed, and the opening problem rewritten to flow more naturally into the first section:

The Problem of Building for an Unknown Future

Every generation inherits the same instinct: preserve what worked, pass it forward. Hand down stable institutions, proven knowledge, time-tested values. But this instinct contains a quiet flaw. It treats the future as an extension of the past, and the young as its curators. What happens when we take seriously the idea that we cannot know what the next generation will value? What if our most responsible act isn't preservation at all, but something far more unsettling?

Feeling young means appreciating what the young care about — and sitting with the honest admission that we can't be sure what young people value today, let alone tomorrow. If we're building the future for young people, we're responsible to rewrite history.

That is a massive shift in perspective, and it flips the traditional view of responsibility on its head. Usually, we think of responsibility as preserving history for the young. But this framing is far more radical and provocative: our true responsibility to the future is to actively rewrite the past.

To locate youthfulness in that uncertainty — in the recognition that we can't predict what the next generation will care about — is to identify youth with pure contingency. The open, unpredictable space of what is yet to come.

If the future is entirely unmapped, then treating history as a fixed, unyielding monument is a disservice to them. Here is why rewriting history is such a powerful way to frame that responsibility.

1. Breaking the Tyranny of the \"Inevitable\"\nWhen we treat history as an objective, unchangeable chain of cause and effect, we accidentally teach the young that the current state of the world is inevitable. We look at existing power structures, economic models, or social norms and say, \"Well, history brought us here, so this is just how things are.\"

Rewriting history — in the sense of re-examining, deconstructing, and changing how we narrate the past — is how we liberate the future. By showing that history was actually a series of fragile, highly contested choices rather than a straight line of destiny, we hand the young a blank canvas. Because the past was malleable, the future is too.

2. Shifting from \"Inheritance\" to \"Possibility\"\nMost generations treat the future like a hand-me-down house. We fix the plumbing, patch the roof, and expect the young to live in it according to our blueprints.

But if we accept this premise — that we genuinely cannot predict what they will value — then our responsibility changes. We shouldn't build specific structures based on our historical values. Instead, we have to rewrite the narrative of our culture to emphasize adaptability, imagination, and openness.

Instead of saying, \"This is the tradition you must uphold,\" rewriting history looks like saying, \"Look at all the times humans completely reinvented themselves. You can do it too.\"

3. The Existential Weight of This View\nThere is a beautiful, grounded empathy in this definition of feeling young. It's not about mimicking youth culture — the clothes, the slang. It's an intellectual humility. An admission that we don't hold the monopoly on what matters.

By acknowledging that future values are inherently uncertain, we choose to stand in that open space with the young, rather than looking down on them from the fortress of past experience.

Rewriting history isn't about erasing facts; it's about refusing to let the past have the final word. It is an act of creative destruction that keeps the world pliable enough for the next generation to actually breathe in it.

Yet once we accept that the future cannot be predicted or even fully prepared for, a second question emerges: how, then, should we actually build? If we can't know what will matter, what justifies the act of making anything at all? The answer has less to do with outcomes than with a deeply human instinct — one that requires no permission from the future to be valid.

Focus on building the future — a future that may or may not be popularized. But we don't need to worry too much about it. Crafting something is in human nature. We might craft 99% of useless inventions or out-of-fashion inventions all the time.

There is a profound, liberating relief in that perspective. It moves the conversation away from the heavy, almost paralyzing burden of \"shaping destiny\" or predicting the next macro-trend, and grounds it entirely in a fundamental human impulse: the joy of craft.

When we stop worrying about whether an idea will become popularized or hit the mainstream, we free ourselves from the tyranny of utility. We trade the anxiety of the visionary for the pure, unadulterated flow of the artisan.

1. The 99% is the Soil, Not the Waste\nIn modern tech and startup culture, there is a massive obsession with scalability and impact. If a project doesn't have a path to a million users, it is often dismissed as a toy or a waste of time.

But this view aligns with how nature actually works. Evolution doesn't calculate the perfect, efficient organism on the first try; it throws millions of random mutations at the wall to see what sticks.

The 99% of \"useless\" inventions isn't a failure rate — it is the necessary ecosystem that allows the 1% to exist.

The out-of-fashion tools are often where the most interesting, soulful quirks live. When we build something that isn't chasing a current trend, we accidentally create something timeless, or at least fiercely authentic.

2. Craft as an End in Itself\nTo say that crafting something is in human nature shifts the reward mechanism entirely. If the value is in the act of building — the puzzle of solving a problem, the tactile or intellectual rhythm of putting pieces together — then a project that ends up completely ignored by the public is still a total success.

It turns the future into a playground rather than a high-stakes exam.

\"We are all potters spinning a wheel. Some pots hold water; some crack in the kiln. But the purpose of the potter is simply to make pots.\"

3. The Unintended Future\nThe paradox of human creativity is that the things that truly change the world rarely look like \"the future\" when they are born. They usually look like toys, niche hobbies, or eccentric obsessions.

When people built early computers, or wrote esoteric programming languages just for the fun of the logic, or spent decades studying obscure linguistic structures, the mainstream world looked at them and saw the useless 99%.

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By letting go of the need to be relevant to the future, we actually give ourselves the best shot at creating something genuinely new. Not bounded by what the world currently deems useful — just building because our hands and minds demand it.