An interview with Matthias Horx, founder of Zukunftsinstitut.
Interview by Kathrin Meister.
The coronavirus pandemic has served us some inconvenient truths that we simply cannot ignore. Take our poor relationship with nature, the source of the virus outbreak. And the fact that our society harbours a lot of division and unhappiness. In responding to the current situation, many people will change their way of thinking and how they interact with others. What it comes down to is changing how we view the environment and finding more resilient ways to coexist on planet earth. This also means a more flexible, vibrant world of work. During the pandemic, many people opted for new lifestyles enabling them to live with other people and with nature in a better way than before.
They can accept the fact that the OLD NORMAL won’t be coming back because it no longer exists. For the past 50 years, we’ve lived in a frenzy of always wanting MORE: more clothes, more passengers on cruise ships, cheaper flights, cheaper meat. In the main, companies’ value creation processes have focused on maximum efficiency. But at some point, the price they had to pay in achieving that simply became too high. In the future, things will be BETTER: how can we build more environmentally sound cars? How can we produce steel without emitting endless quantities of carbon into the air? And how can we overcome constant over-stimulation and the demands experienced in daily media use? In the future, the focus will be more on PURPOSE than objective – on the underlying REASONS why companies need to seek solutions to problems that actually exist. It’s less about reduction and restraint and more about enrichment.
“We’re moving into an era of major transformation.”
The key trend in my view is NEO-ECOLOGY. With that I mean a definition of environmental awareness that is neither passive nor guilt-ridden and doesn’t call for renouncement and regret. We’re moving into an era of major transformation that calls for us to go without fossil fuels and build new systems for renewable energy consumption and materials supply. On many levels, that means changing the way we think and feel. When exploring processes and searching for symbioses, we can learn a lot from nature. If we achieve the transformation – which we will – then our quality of life as a modern civilisation can also be improved.
I dream pretty well. The idea isn’t for people to be constantly influenced by negative thoughts and fears. Those who are no longer able to dream ‘ahead’, into the future, won’t have an easy life. In many cases, it’s our bad dreams that show us how to let go of things from the past. Dreams are the brain’s way of getting rid of clutter. Fears dissipate just like the images in our dreams.
Matthias Horx is a trends and futures researcher, publicist and visionary. Already as a young technophile in the 1960s, he was interested in the mysteries of the future. After a career as a journalist and publicist, he became the most influential futurist in the German-speaking world.
He has published some 20 books, many of which have become bestsellers. He founded Germany’s most important think tank for the future, the Zukunftsinstitut with headquarters in Frankfurt and Vienna. A passionate European, he commutes between London, Frankfurt and Vienna, where he has lived with his family since 2010, in the “Future Evolution House”.
Source: www.horx.com
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