Name: Esther Perel Invites Us to Imagine Our Preferred Future: Where Should We Begin? Live from SXSW 2025
Uploaded: 2025-03-23T16:55:37.000Z
Duration: 53 min 26 s
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Modal verbs - A2

Welcome to the live recording from the Vox Media Stage at SXSW of another episode of Where Should We Begin?

Familiar with Where Should We Begin, anyone?

So, here is the story that I need to tell you.

This session was supposed to be a session between me and Dr. Peter Attia and we titled the session

Why Would You Want to Live Longer If You're So Unhappy?

It's a question that I asked him a few years ago when he was writing his book Outlive and it prompted him to rethink some of his definition of longevity and to add a chapter on the importance of emotional health in his thinking about overall health.

Dr. Attia had a family emergency, his father is very ill and he had to cancel right after his presentation here, actually.

So I had to rethink what will I do and with whom would I like to be in conversation.

And I also thought, you know, here is this conversation on longevity that we typically think of within the world that we're living in but then I went to listen to Amy Webb and she was, you were, I'm going to talk to you, you were presenting a whole other world in which I had to project myself in and I had a range of emotions as I was listening to this presentation.

Highs and lows and attractions and disgust and pulls and pushes and it was like a whole range of experiences of the world in which I hope to live in longer.

And then I met Frederic Ferd who is explicitly a non-futurist and I thought that would be an amazing conversation between a futurist and a non-futurist, between someone who makes predictions and someone who helps us imagine.

And then I thought of the painter Magritte, the Belgian painter who would do a painting where he would put a glass on top of an umbrella and he would call it the Vacations of Hegel and I thought that kind of associative thinking, a pipe is not a pipe if you remember that painting, which is really what you see isn't necessarily what it is because if you see it on a painting then it's not really a pipe.

And how do we create that separation between our internal experience, the subjective and the factual?

Amy Webb, you are the CEO of Future Today Strategy Group and Frederic Ferd, you were the evangelist of Google innovation and the founder of the Google Garage, the lab for creativity.

We are all three on a threesome blind date.

So just to say yes like that is for me a real special thing.

Amy, we should start by what is a futurist?

If you could share with us your definition, your working definition of what is a futurist.

Sure, I could give you a technical explanation of what I do but I think it might be more interesting to hear a quick story.

So in post, just as the Cold War was heating up, there was a man named Herman Kahn who had been hired by the Air Force to help predict the aftermath of a full-blown nuclear war because at that point, the United States was building up a gigantic stockpile of warheads as was the Soviet Union.

So it was a very dangerous, horrific time.

At that point, Herman Kahn was trying to explain, look, there are probably many different futures depending on the decisions that get made but military strategists only saw two.

Everybody is continuing to feel anxious because we have all of these warheads or total annihilation.

Herman Kahn did not want total annihilation but also couldn't get these people to change their minds.

He knew that the data alone you could use to predict but it wasn't enough to influence the decisions that a leader might make.

So instead, he came up with the idea of a scenario, a scene, and started telling stories about what might happen in the aftermath of an attack.

They weren't emotional but they evoked emotion.

He described every child's lunch, their milk containers would explain exactly how much radiation was in it and what that might be like.

And his approach was to describe not total annihilation but a world in which we all survived.

So the way that I like to describe what I do because there is a predictive piece of it and there is a heavy amount of quantitative and qualitative research but none of that matters if we don't influence how people make their decisions.

You have to take a pragmatic approach because the future arrives through the decisions that we make in the present.

And oftentimes, those decisions are the result of how people feel in a moment which could be influenced by a hundred things that have nothing at all to do with the decision that they're actually making.

So it's incredible because you just gave me that title.

I think we should not label people in a way that they are this or that or whatever they might do.

What I care about, and I think that's what most of us care about, is the future.

And not just care about it but take care of it.

And so what I want to help people to do is see the future differently.

That they see it as something that is not the future.

Because that's the only thing that's going to happen for you.

The future is not something that happens to you.

And the future is also not out there on the horizon.

I think the future is happening right now in this moment.

It's decided by our choices we make in every moment.

If I choose to be kind to someone, that determines my future.

And the future is also something where we don't have to look outside.

To try to imagine, as we human beings have that ability to imagine.

Imagine a future that we want to see happening.

And we mostly go to three places when we imagine the future.

So we imagine ourselves in a year from today being at the beach or being in a house or being in some place on this planet.

Then we're trying to imagine who we're going to be surrounded by.

Our co-workers or the people that are in our community or the families.

And then we're trying to imagine what we actually engage in.

But I think there's missing an incredible piece in that picture.

And that is, how do we want to feel in the future?

That is the most critical question you need to ask yourself.

Because imagining how you want to feel in the future helps you to actually make progress towards that.

So I had this moment when you were talking that I was in a session with a couple.

Both of you agree that decisions made in the present influence very much the future.

But you are experiencing reality very differently.

And then, as I do in the session, you talk, but I'm watching you.

I could not disagree more with everything that you just said.

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Esther Perel Invites Us to Imagine Our Preferred Future: Where Should We Begin? Live from SXSW 2025

anxiety

potential

absolutely

approach