Future Design Inquiries. May 2024

Designing the future

Futures happen by default or by design. Here are some things we think push past the default.

Hello from your friends at enso, a future design company.

For anyone new here, we’re sharing the things that make us think, bring us joy or shift our perspective. And we welcome your reactions, additions, and suggestions – reach out news@enso.co.

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What we’re reflecting on

These nuggets are curated by enso partners Hanna Siegel (HS) and Sebastian Buck (SB).

This is a very big deal

The G7 countries have committed to phasing out coal power by 2035. This agreement, which puts a timeline on commitments made at the COP28 conference in Dubai last year, is imperfect to be sure. But it represents a huge step towards progress against climate change, especially because these countries are major emitters themselves, and typically influence other countries to follow their lead. Sound like something you should have heard about but haven’t? It’s shocking to me how little play this story has gotten, despite being teed up for awhile. When there is a scary report about climate change, it’s everywhere. When there’s progress, it’s not only hard to find but caveated to death, reflecting the doomerist sentiment that’s pervaded our culture, especially on this issue. And because our brains are wired to feel the pain of one step back much more than the progress of one step forward (and because the media industry knows this and capitalizes on it for profit), we buy into that culture. So consider this our small effort at resistance. Progress is happening. Let’s celebrate it. Action builds hope. (HS)

The history of happiness

This poll, by Gallup, Walton Family Foundation, and Arthur C. Brooks, caught my eye not only because of its good news (7 in 10 Gen Zers say they’re happy) but because of its contrary conclusion to so many others, like the World Happiness Report, showing that young people in the US came in at a dismal 62nd on the ranking relative to young people in other countries (Note: the World Happiness Report has a significantly bigger sample size, and more rigorous methodology, than the Gallup poll.) It all made me wonder: How long have we been studying happiness? The answer – to my surprise – is a pretty long time. The History of Happiness from HBR offers interesting context, including that Americans led the way in moving society from a culture “saddened approach to life” to one that highly values, and is committed to, happiness. 

In fact, 

“The smiling American was becoming a stereotype two centuries ago, as a new nation sought to justify its existence by projecting superior claims to happiness. It was no accident that this same new nation, at this same point, quietly revolutionized the approach to death by introducing the garden cemetery, where people could gain a sense of contentment, if not happiness, as they contemplated the end of life.” 

For all the things I’ve been taught about what it means to be American, at least historically (entrepreneurial, hard-working, welcoming, resilient), happy never made the list. So today, as we fight a culture of fear, doomerism, anxiety and urgency, it’s worth remembering that we once led the way in creating a culture where happiness is important, studied, cultivated and valued. Surely, we can do it again. (HS)

Is happiness becoming a luxury good?

Bear with me as I continue this train of thought because no sooner had I finished writing the last paragraph, then Derek Thompson’s great newsletter Work in Progress hit my inbox and dove into the question ‘what matters most for happiness?’ He spoke with Gallup’s top economist, Jonathan Rockwell who did some analysis building on what’s already been done, and found that there is a ‘holy trinity of happiness’ – marriage, money and meaningful relationships. But they are inextricably linked, and the money piece matters more than we’d like to believe. As Thompson says, 

“Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives.” 

Given this, how can we change our society so that income level doesn’t end up dictating so much of what makes us happy, or not? (HS)

Star pupil, 'Nature,' has all the answers, again

During Covid, we at enso had the fortune to spend time researching nature’s healing impact on the mind (with Arc’teryx, in development of Outer Peace); tldr: nature quickly reduces cortisol (the stress-induced hormone triggering fight or flight responses), and increases dopamine, making us feel better, and be better humans. I just read another book on this topic by Sue Stuart-Smith, a psychiatrist and garden lover: The Well Gardened Mind, which includes many other dimensions of the story.  For instance, when soldiers came back from World War I they often were treated, with great success, in centers that included gardening as part of the healing process; over time, gardens were replaced by pharmaceuticals. Carl Jung believed so deeply in tending nature that he said, “every human should have a plot of land so that their instincts can come to life again”. I was also struck by ‘mind as garden’ as a superior metaphor to the popular ‘mind as computer’; the computer metaphor suggests that our ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ are relatively immutable, whereas the garden metaphor suggests we have the ability to tend, weed, prune and cultivate over time. (SB)

Narrow attention vs. Wide attention

In 1934, an author named Marion Milner published a book based on a diary she’d kept trying to pinpoint which experiences made her feel most alive (imagine trying to do that in the middle of the Great Depression, granted Milner was British so things were slightly better over there). In A Life of One’s Own, she realizes that she pays two kinds of attention to things: 

1/Narrow attention, the kind that serves your immediate interests and ignores the rest.
2/Wide attention, the kind where you’re not seeking anything specific and therefore you can step back and really see the whole. 

(Hat tip to Austin Kleon for bringing this to my attention through his excellent newsletter). It’s another framework for thinking about the very current problem around our attention economy. Narrow attention isn’t bad – in fact, it’s often necessary. But I think we’re over indexing on it as a society. Capitalism has taught us to want something in return for giving something away, including attention. But I’m going to fight those deep-seated learnings and try focusing on things for no specific purpose other than to experience it – and see what comes up. (HS)

TED2024 in one take-away

The annual TED summit is a firehose of inspiration: over 70 well-curated, surprising talks, and better than all that, 1,700 truly fascinating people in curiosity mode. I see many people try to summarize such a feast in impossible ways, like ‘ten insights from TED’ … they don’t have a hope of capturing it, but I thought I’d go even more absurd and just do one. Pete Stavros of KKR, spoke compellingly about an investment where they spread ownership across 800 employees, and achieved a 10X return, transforming lives and communities. Zaynep Ton shared how companies that treat their employees better, do better (other than Pete’s talk, these are not yet released). Gibran Huzaifah illustrated that with a magical story of rising from poverty to develop a fish feeding device, which became the basis for a business that now helps hundreds of thousands of fish farmers and their families rise through entrepreneurship. Sonia Vallabh turned an untreatable disease diagnosis into a crusade to solve the disease for everyone. Mark Grimmer, of 59 Productions, talked about their work to create moments of collective wonder, including one of my personal favorites, ‘This is for everyone’ at the London 2012 Olympics. Brian Lowery, of Stanford, put a bow on this theme with the compelling take that the pursuit of happiness often distracts from the path to a meaningful life: the impact you make on others. My absurdly simplified TED2024 theme:  it’s not about you, it’s about how you serve the people around you. (SB)

14 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:

• Pangrams – a sentence that contains all letters of the alphabet:
  • The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
  • Puzzled women bequeath jerks very exotic gifts.
  • Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
• Japanese trailblazer, nonagenarian and overall badass Yayoi Kusama was the top selling contemporary artist of 2023. Long live polka dots.  

• Margot Robbie studies with a coach who helps her look to the animal kingdom as she prepares for roles. Specifically, she picks an animal she believes identifies with the character, studies it deeply, ‘transforms’ (!) into that animal and then eventually brings that transformation to her performance. FYI she was a pitbull (off the ice) and a mustang (on the ice) for I, Tonya. Here’s a video of her talking about it – it’s wild. 
• Relationship satisfaction at age 50 is the single biggest predictor of physical health at age 80. More than cholesterol, blood pressure or any other traditional health indicator. As Dr. Robert Waldinger at Harvard (who oversees the longest-running study on adult life, health, and happiness in the world) says, "By far the biggest medical surprise of the past decade has been the extraordinary number of studies showing that the single biggest predictor of your psychological and physical health and wellbeing is simply the number and quality of close friendships you have."
• Being back boredom: How to be less busy and more happy
  
• Turning social pressure into charming elegance: Never have aunties been so magical
  
• Step aside Pep: The invincible girls football/soccer team 

• Crazy is a self-limiting disease: Right wing media traffic is collapsing
  
• Delightful minimalism: Om Malik’s photography
  
• Delightful maximalism: Derrick Ofosu Boateng’s photography
  
• MLK is such a titan of culture that the human behind the legend can be obscured; Jonathan Eig’s new biography goes deep on the motivations, the pressure, the family life, and the plots to undermine him. Do we have to put the people who call us to our best selves through the wringer?
• On the subject of ‘what else can nature teach us?’, Robert Sapolsky is fascinating on the difference in stress reaction from zebras (and the best air traffic controllers) to baboons (and bad air traffic controllers) — it’s all about anticipatory stress, which impacts everything from our wellbeing to our political affiliations.

What we’re working on

enso is a small, senior team so that we can work on just a few initiatives at a time. This allows us to go deep on some of the biggest challenges/ opportunities. Recently, we’ve been working on a few main missions with our partners:

1. A brand to radiate optimism: As you can probably tell, we think restoring optimism in the world is essential. We're exploring building a product, content and community brand around this idea.
2. Design The Future book: Distilling wisdom from those actively designing and creating the future, from a wide variety of fields. We hope to complete this in 2024.
3. Radical leap stories: Showing how internet transforms lives around the world
4. Opening space: Advancing technology is making space exploration possible in unprecedented ways. What will it mean for medicine, climate, science and life beyond Earth? 
5. Engaging the young: Study after study shows that young people are disengaged from civic life, fatigued by our culture of doom (especially in politics). How can we reverse this, in the places that matter most? 
6. Helping anyone build their future: How can we enable any entrepreneur to build their future through a business that can reach the world? 

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enso • 115 W California Blvd #9101 Pasadena, CA 91105