An open notebook, brass compass, reading glasses and a coffee cup on a wooden desk, with a window beyond looking out over a rocky coastal landscape in golden light.

Ten Years From Now

What have we accomplished in ten years from now?

As a little girl in primary school, I loved assignments like “Describe a day in the future.”

I’d be dreaming up flying cars, food in pill form, people solving big problems with even bigger ideas. It felt like fun and play at the time, but underneath was a sense of endless possibilities. Anything could happen. Anything could be fixed. And I believed we were all smart enough to figure it out.

I’ve grown up since then. A bit more realistic. But that spark, that fascination with the future, never left.

Years later, I started ending every podcast conversation with the same question. What have we accomplished in ten years from now? Phrased like that on purpose — in the past tense, as if it’s already done. People answer it differently when the future is a place they’ve already been.

That conviction sits underneath three different parts of this work — a question I keep asking, a kind of story I keep returning to, and a small piece of software I built so other people can try the exercise themselves.

01 The Question

Why I ask this of everyone.

Every guest, no matter the topic, gets the same closing question. What have we accomplished in ten years from now? It catches people slightly off guard, which is part of the point.

If I asked “what do you hope happens?” I’d get hopes — soft, hedged, qualified. If I asked “what do you think will happen?” I’d get forecasts — cautious, calibrated, often gloomy. The past-tense framing skips both of those modes. It assumes the future has already arrived. The only question is what was true when it did.

What I’ve learned, after more than a hundred of these answers, is that people are mostly stuck at the level of the next twelve months. They can describe what they’re worried about. They can describe what they’re working on. They can’t always describe a place ten years out where the worry has resolved. The question is a small instrument for that.

02 Rehearsal

What can fiction do that forecasts can’t?

Forecasts narrow. They give you a number, a curve, a probability band. They are useful and they are necessary and they are not the whole job.

Fiction widens. A novel, a short story, an interactive scenario, a film — these can hold the texture of a future in a way a forecast can’t. What it smells like. Who’s in the room. What people argue about over dinner. Whether the children are okay. Climate fiction, in particular, has done some of the most important imaginative work of the last decade, not because the writers are predicting anything, but because they’re rehearsing it.

I’ve had several conversations on the podcast with people who do this for a living — novelists, game designers, scenario practitioners, futurists. They don’t agree about much, but they all keep saying a version of the same thing: before we can build it, we have to be able to imagine it.

03 The Tool

Try it yourself.

I built a small tool called FutureVision that walks you through your own version of the question — not for the world, but for your own life. You describe where you are now. You pick a timeframe. You describe what you want. The tool generates a handful of small artefacts from the future you’re imagining — a diary entry, a newspaper clipping, a message from future-you — and then suggests a path back to where you’re standing today.

Open FutureVision in a new window →

I don’t think any of this replaces the hard work of deciding, or building, or showing up tomorrow morning. But I think we’ve under-used the imagination muscle — in our careers, in our institutions, in our climate conversations — and the last decade has shown what happens when the only stories we can tell about the future are anxious ones.

So I keep asking the question. I keep listening to people who write the wider stories. And I keep pointing at the tool, because the cheapest version of futures thinking is the one you do for yourself, on a quiet evening, ten minutes at a time.

— Veslemøy

Where I’ve worked this out

The essay that introduced the tool, the solo episode that walks through it, and the guest conversations that pushed the imagination side of this work further.

What have we accomplished in ten years from now?

Why I ask this of everyone.

What can fiction do that forecasts can’t?

Try it yourself.

What If You Could See Your Future — Today?

See Your Future Before You Build It — the FutureVision tool

Imagining Better Futures Through Interactive Storytelling — Dain Saint

Unleashing Imagination: Fantasy Fiction Fights Climate Change — Laurel Colless

Climate Fiction: How Stories Can Shape Our Future — Steve Willis

Exploring the Power of Story — Merlin Bola

Let’s Co-Create a Beautiful Future — Anne Bland