Funny. I’ve just been in hospital for the day. Seems it’s a false alarm, or at least not what I thought it was. This is slightly annoying on one trivial level, because I’ve spent the last month spending like there’s no tomorrow on the warped basis that there may be no tomorrow. I’ll now have to get used to £10 bottles of wine again. What a difference a zero can make. Add a few more zeros and you could write a good film script about someone that spent borrowed money on a similar basis and then had to make it all back again – fast.

On a more serious note I now agree with someone who said that it should be compulsory for all adults to spend 24-hours in a public hospital, especially A&E. It gives you a perspective that’s rarely available elsewhere. You could see this today. People came into the ward in the morning and by the afternoon their lives had totally changed. What they thought they were – and were going to be – had totally changed in the space of a few hours. I don’t think that anyone could take selling something like tinned soup seriously after something like that. You’d surely have to do something more meaningful.

I also liked the sense of equality. Also the fact that the exposure of human flesh to others somehow bared your soul as well. There was a strange connectedness with strangers. A conviviality that’s somehow often lacking elsewhere. Maybe we all need to get semi-naked more often.

One thing I did manage to do during my blissful, but occasionally tense, six hours in distraction-free limbo-land was finish off Future Babble. This is really a rather good book, especially if you are involved with any kind of long-term forecasting or planning. I especially liked this quote from Alistair Cooke, from the 1970s I’d guess: “In the best of times our days are numbered anyway… and so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world’s crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place. The opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.” Amen to that.

A runaway milk tanker may hit me tomorrow, but, if not, things should vaguely start to getting back to normal. I’m also fired up about writing something of real substance for a change. I doubt that this will be the blog, although given enough time you never know. It could be What’s Next, but I feel a new book is coming on. The result, of course, be junk, but I’m getting a feeling about something that’s widely felt but rarely said.

I’m getting hugely behind again. One of my kids is now sick, so after 8-weeks of school holidays he managed to be back at school for a day before he was off again.

Rushing to get something done for a workshop in Luxembourg this week and another in Switzerland next and then need to proofread Future Vision and read material for the next issue of What’s Next. Future Babble is 90% read (thoroughly recommended), as is Grace by Jeff Buckley, which I’ve been listening to a lot.

Excerpt from Future Babble:

“As for why we believe expert predictions, the answer lies ultimately in our hard-wired aversion to uncertainty. People want to know what’s happening now and what will happen in the future, and admitting we don’t know can be profoundly disturbing. So we try to eliminate uncertainty however we can. We see patterns where there are none. We treat random results as if they are meaningful. And we treasure stories that replace the complexity and uncertainty of reality with simple narratives about what’s happening and what will happen. Sometimes we create these stories ourselves, but, even with the human mind’s bountiful capacity for self-delusion, it can be hard to fool ourselves into thinking we know what the future holds for the stock market, the climate, the price of oil, or a thousand other pressing issues. So we look to experts. They must know. They have Ph.D.s, prizes, and offices in major universities. And thanks to the news media’s preference for the simple and dramatic, the sort of expert we are likely to hear from is confident and conclusive. They know what will happen; they are certain of it. We like that because that is how we want to feel. And so we convince ourselves that these wise men and women can do what wise men and women have never been able to do before. Fundamentally, we believe because we want to believe.”

Lot’s more from Future Babble via the New York Times here

Just been in Switzerland visiting a chocolate factory (it was a tough job, especially the chocolate tasting part at the end). I’ve also continued reading Future Bable by Dan Gardner, which is really good. It’s essentially about the futility of long-term forecasting. I’ll post a couple of excerpts over the next few days.

Remember what I said yesterday about people switching off? Total rubbish.

What’s in my head? Not a lot, which is underrated.

The last Greek hotel I stayed in was huge and somehow rather frenetic. Perhaps it was the constant wind. Most of the hotel guests – a party-mix of well fed Americans and Europeans, along with a number of freshly-minted Russians – were glued to various mobile devices and were not settled. They were all physically there, but none of them, it seemed, were mentally present. They appeared to be scanning the cyber-horizon to see whether something more interesting was happening elsewhere. They certainly seemed incapable of letting go. Mild frustration mixed with disappointment seemed the dominant theme.

Contrast this with where I am now – a 15-minute flight away. The pace is glacial, if that’s not oxymoronic for a volcanic island. The wind has more or less disappeared and it’s stillness that now dominates. People are sitting, looking outwards. But this outer gaze inevitably turns inwards. People end up looking at things with their hearts.

Why would this be so? I think the reason is the view.

I’m in a tiny hotel (14 rooms) overlooking an extinct volcano that last erupted several thousand years ago. The crater is about 14 kilometres across and is filled with very deep, and hence very still, water. The view is uplifting. It’s partly the distance, but you should never confuse a long distance with a good view. What is happening is that people are looking at is themselves reflected in the water.

The mobile devices that were so ubiquitous a few days ago have largely disappeared and people appear to be contemplating both their immediate past and their more distant future. It seems impossible for any thinking person not to be seduced. I suspect that this is due to several thousand years of human history mixing with a geological event of such intensity that all human accomplishment is meaningless.

It reminds me slightly of a conversation I had watching a cricket match a few months ago. I was talking with someone about what I liked about Europe and said that the age of things, especially some of the buildings, left me feeling hugely connected with everything historically. But that simultaneously it meant feeling totally insignificant. Bizarrely, both felt rather empowering.

This place is much the same. The age of the surroundings, together with the raw potential of nature, makes you feel simultaneously connected and disconnected. You feel like stardust one minute and personal assistant to Zeus the next. Thinking is elevated. Minutiae disappear, replaced by substance.

In my experience you can connect with this kind of thinking almost anywhere, bit to do so one has to first do absolutely nothing. It is only with disconnection and letting go that one can arrive at this destination. It is only by sitting quietly, looking outwards, that one can start to see what really maters.

Worth a look. Click here to go to BBC.com/future
Thanks Nick for spotting.

Here’s a quote you may like. I’ve spent most of the day planting box hedging, largely because it’s deeply satisfying, unlike my ‘new’ (it’s a 3) iPhone, which has become so annoying that I’ve given up trying to fix it.

I’m thinking of getting a nice metal hammer and smashing the s**t out of it. The battery life is equivalent to the lunchtime nap of a Mayfly and it’s latest little quirk is telling me that I don’t have enough credit to use data. I’m supposed to call 4444 to sort this out, but for some reason the ‘dismiss’ button is being dismissive and won’t f**ck off when I press it. It’s a good job I’m not having a heart attack and really need to use my f***ing phone.

BTW, my really old phone is doing just fine and seems to last a week with a single charge. Mind you, it’s somehow switched predictive texting off and refuses to let me change it back, which makes writing rather laborious, and one day last week suddenly switched to French without warning. Quelle surprise!

Oh, the quote…

“Entrepreneurs are congenitally wired to be too early. And being too early is a bigger problem than not being correct.”
– Marc Andreessen, Co-founder of Netscape
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It is still holiday time so don’t expect too much here. Today I’m doing some final comments on one of my books, Future Vision, and trying to work out how the dog got out of the garden over the weekend – and walked 20-minutes up the road to the pub by himself. I assume we have a hole in the fence somewhere.

Two things that have caught my eye over the last few days. The first is a snippet in the Shaping Tomorrow newsletter about self-organising textbooks. If you don’t know about Shaping Tomorrow it’s worth checking out – www.shapingtomorrow.com

The second snippet came via Corrina in Oz (a regular What’s Next contributor) who spotted a story about a women-only city planned in Saudi Arabia. Full story here.