The future is already here today. We may still be in a phase of transition, but times are definitely changing. What are the trends and megatrends already shaping life as we know it today? And what can we infer from them for the future of society, business and culture? From its offices in Frankfurt and Vienna, renowned think tank Zukunftsinstitut has identified 12 megatrends emerging in our current, uncertain times, and shines the spotlight on what needs to be done today.
Individualisation – the reigning cultural principle in the western world – is gaining an increasing hold across the globe. A complex megatrend that has long peaked in many of our richest nations, it now forms the backbone of our social structure. Individualisation shapes value systems, consumption patterns, lifestyles and cultures in equal measure. While in essence it equates to freedom of choice, its complex effects give rise to seemingly countervailing trends such as the ‘we culture’, along with new imperatives and constraints. In the COVID-19 pandemic, solidarity and community spirit have become increasingly more important than exclusion and ‘me first’, thus fuelling the shift towards post-individualisation.
In the gender shift era, gender no longer preordains the paths we follow – be it when choosing a career or deciding what clothes we wear. Never before has the fact that someone is born as a woman or a man said so little about the direction their life will take. Giving rise to a new pluralism culture, this dismantling of gender stereotypes has ushered in radical change – both in the business world and in society at large. The coronavirus pandemic has only served to foster this trend. Bringing existing disparities to light, it’s acting as a catalyst, forcing people to reflect on a society that appears equal at first face.
The world’s populations may be ageing, but people are staying healthy for longer than ever before. Today’s silver society hails a completely new way of living in the ‘third stage’ of life – a phase that’s becoming longer, empowering ‘silver seniors’ to embrace self-development and find fulfilment in old age. Waving goodbye to the quest for eternal youth and lending new meaning to age and ageing, this silver mindset paves the way for a healthier, more active society born of this different definition of age. The Covid pandemic has come as a backlash to the free ageing trend – ‘age’ is suddenly synonymous with ‘risk group’, a much less attractive term.
Society is more knowledgeable than at any time in the past. Around the world, education levels are at an all-time high. Most of all in combination with the megatrend of connectivity, our knowledge of the world and the way we deal with information – our knowledge culture – is changing. It’s thanks to the pandemic that education has finally become digital, moved online, and that the collaborative, distributed structures needed for knowledge generation have been fostered along with innovative thinking.
The new work megatrend describes an epochal transition that starts questions of meaning and purpose and completely redesigns the world of work. Hailing the era of the creative economy, it signals the move away from meritocratic ideals. ‘New work’ places individual development potential firmly centre stage – in the workplace of the future, what counts is symbiosis between work and everyday life. Enter the coronavirus crisis, emerging as a driver of the new work trend, making work more agile and more flexible and taking it more online. This outcome is set to stay.
Health is synonymous with quality of life. As an important life goal, this megatrend has become firmly fixed in people’s minds, in national cultures, in how societies see themselves – and shapes all areas of life. With health and happiness increasingly difficult to prise apart, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought people’s perception of health as a self-optimisation process right back down to earth. Health is now being seen as the absence of ill-health, meaning illness – and as something that affects not just us as individuals, but those around us as well.
Environmental awareness has transitioned from a lifestyle choice to a movement of huge social scale. While the megatrend of neo-ecology is shifting the values of global society, lifestyle culture and policymaking, it’s also turning entrepreneurial thinking and action completely on their heads. In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, this megatrend is opening people’s eyes – the pandemic acts as a forceful reminder that not only are we part of nature, but that nature cannot be truly harnessed or controlled. By pushing our reset buttons, it has opened the door to a post-pandemic society shaped by sustainable development notions and a slower pace of life.
The principle of connectedness has long dominated social change, opening up a new chapter in societal evolution. Digital communication technologies are reprogramming sociocultural codes, creating new lifestyles, attitudes and behaviours. This already powerful trend towards connectivity gained an extra boost when the coronavirus crisis moved many of our interpersonal encounters online. The pandemic has effectively pulled digitalisation out of the future and into the present day.
The trend towards globalisation is often blamed for making the world fragmented and more complex, for fostering trade wars, diplomatic spats, cyber hacking and global mega-corporations running roughshod over national laws. How do we deal with our hyper-connected, mega-complex world? The big dilemma in all of this comes in our attempts to regulate global-level processes and problems with national-level policies and tools. In the COVID-19 crisis, this has been thrust into the spotlight, further driving the glocalisation trend in which the global and the local are combined in novel ways.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, urban living has seen far more change and disruption than has rural life. Previously, city dwellers took their mobility for granted along with a quality of life enhanced by everything cities have to offer. The pandemic has since put paid to some of the benefits associated with city life. In lockdown, home became the place to be, taking on a new importance as social life came to a standstill. Although urban hospitality sectors and cultural programmes are slowly recovering, it’s hard to predict when city life will return to normal again. The shift in emphasis to the home is here to stay and will accompany the urbanisation megatrend into the future.
Of all the recent megatrends, mobility has been hit hardest in the coronavirus pandemic – it was virtually brought to a halt. Our connected society has a constantly growing need for travel and for access to an increasing range of alternative transport modes – the future of mobility is connected, digital, post-fossil and shared. Prior to the pandemic, mobility was simply part of everyday life that was becoming faster and more complex by the day. When national borders were closed and access restrictions introduced, the pace of life suddenly slowed and in some places everything stopped. It seems mobility and travel will be viewed differently in the post-pandemic world.
Society is in a constant state of alarm: one crisis leads to another and the pandemic has made it abundantly clear just how uncertain and fragile our lives and our surroundings are. More than ever, security is the order of the day – for individuals, for society, and also as a key value proposition in selling things. But notions that the world is becoming less and less secure can be deceptive to say the least – the world as we know it today is the safest it’s ever been.
Source: www.zukunftsinstitut.de
Founded in 1998, Zukunftsinstitut has offices in Frankfurt and Vienna. It played a key role in shaping German trends and futures research right from its inception. The Institute is now one of Europe’s most influential think tanks on trends and futures research. Be it for decision-makers or forward-thinkers, Zukunftsinstitut is now a prominent source of information and inspiration.
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