In 2015, I found myself at a bar seated next to a man who was pitching me on a new currency called bitcoin. I was unconvinced. In the early ’90s, I declared that email would “never take off.” I have often exhibited what some might call limited foresight.
In “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything — Even Things That Seem Impossible Today,” game designer and professional futurist Jane McGonigal (“Reality Is Broken” and “SuperBetter”) makes the case for thinking far beyond the current moment so that when someone introduces innovations like email and bitcoin, you might find them plausible.
McGonigal has the rare distinction of being one of the few people on the planet who anticipated the current pandemic. As part of her work, in 2008 she created a six-week simulation of a fictional global respiratory virus, which accurately predicted most of what has transpired with COVID-19. This doesn’t mean McGonigal is gifted with psychic abilities; she just actively looks at the world through a long lens and constantly gathers clues around her.
What we determine to be “unthinkable” or “unimaginable” are just that, failures of thought and imagination. The past can act like a prison, limiting your notions about what’s possible to what has already happened. In “Imaginable,” McGonigal trains us to think like futurists, bending our brains so that all possibilities are conceivable.
“Imaginable” is an accessible, optimistic field guide to the future, and McGonigal organizes it into three parts: Unstick your mind, think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable.
She starts by asking us to think 10 years ahead, a long window that induces the psychological phenomenon of “time spaciousness,” then suggests looking at the world with “strangesight” — the precursor to foresight, noticing new developments (“future forces”) that might portend a larger shift. Instead of just paying attention, McGonigal wants us to be “paying imagination” to the world around us.
Our current world is full of neon signs of what’s to come — climate catastrophe, economic inequality, a mass disabling from the pandemic, a growing mental health crisis and more. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a universal trauma; from social isolation to illness to death, we are living through what was once inconceivable.
For a book about the future, which these days feels quite bleak, McGonigal’s book is bizarrely upbeat and radiates hope. Her writing has the uncanny ability to make a reader optimistic about terrifying scenarios. The thesis is not that the future is rosy, but that if we imagine the unthinkable now, when it hits we will be more capable of moving past shock and denial into action.
在上一节,麦格尼格尔提出了模拟s of future scenarios to work through alone or with your family or a group, including a tick-borne disease and a 10-year winter. Each future is plausible, and McGonigal creates a detailed simulation so you can thoroughly interrogate how you would live in such a world.
Here in the Bay Area, it’s not a matter of if but when we have a major earthquake. When it comes, you might panic, or you might have a car full of gas, water and food under the bed, a backup satellite phone, and a mental game plan of what to do. You will be ready because you’ve imagined.
Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything — Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
By Jane McGonigal
(Spiegel & Grau; 432 pages; $30)
The Commonwealth Club presents Jane McGonigal:6 p.m. March 30. In person $25 ($55 with book); virtual: $5 ($30 with book), registration required. Free or discounted for members. 110 The Embarcadero, S.F.www.commonwealthclub.org
Book Passage presents Jane McGonigal:Online event. 5 p.m. April 12. Must preorder a signed copy of “Imaginable” from Book Passage, $30, by Monday, March 21, to participate.www.bookpassage.com/Imaginable