“Blind Orion searching for the sun” by Nicholas Poussin via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve had two conversations in the last few months about the future of synthetic drugs. Both conversations were with respected politicians (one elected, one a candidate), and both followed the lines of a similar narrative that goes a little something like this: synthetic drugs are cheaper and easier to manufacture than their natural forebears. The receptivity to these drugs is rising due to a variety of socioeconomic factors. There is a worrying deterioration of physical and mental health in the population at large. The future of cities — not just in America, but everywhere — is at stake.
When multiple people tell me a story about the future, I’ve learned to pay attention. But I’d be remiss not to mention that there is a long history of hypocrisy and fearmongering about drugs when it comes to American politics. I grew up in the Just Say No era and can recall with searing precision the ad that likened one’s brain on drugs to an egg frying in a skillet. Perhaps even more memorable was the famous “I learned it by watching you” ad, with its shame-faced father holding a box full of uppers, downers, and God knows what else. I’m also wary of the tendency of our influence machines to slap the label of crisis on anything that might generate clicks. Twitter threads like this one describing the fentanyl-fueled urban blight in San Francisco may be grounded in truth, but they feel more exploitive than instructive or compassionate.
Still, in the contours of this unfortunate scenario, I see a pattern that relates to some of the subjects the futures team I’m part of has been thinking about related to the future of trust and technology, and I think it’s worth addressing both the threat described as well as the orientation it engenders. Both are representative of larger attitudes about the future I find myself encountering across topic domains.
First, let me legitimize the rationale behind the argument these unusually respected politicians are making. As the CDC has pointed out repeatedly, deaths from illicit drugs are trending upward, and recently topped 100,000 for the first time. Diplomatic pressure is rising to curtail the manufacturing of fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin. If you’re looking for a harrowing portrayal of what a worst case future might look like in our cities, you might read this NYT article about what xylazine, an animal sedative and fentanyl mix, is doing to vulnerable populations in Philadelphia. Here in Colorado, fentanyl deaths are rising faster than almost anywhere else in the U.S.
In futures work, we often encourage questions like “What if this trend were 10 times bigger?” It doesn’t take much here to get to something scary: one million overdose deaths a year feels pretty damn dystopian.
It’s easy to start connecting dots to show how this worst case scenario might happen. This is a world where trend lines for mental health, the loneliness epidemic, and worsening inequality continue to rise at a frightening clip. Knock-on effects from learning loss during Covid contribute to increased susceptibility for addiction, particularly in economically disadvantaged populations. Slowing economic growth adds gas to the fire, and the manufacturing of synthetic drugs continues to expand in China and Mexico to meet demand. Additionally, we see the expansion of smaller scale, ad-hoc efforts enabled by greater access to both information and manufacturing capacity. Put all these things together, and a nightmare scenario is easily constructed.
But perhaps the scariest part of imagining this scenario is the sense that at its core, it’s about a deterioration of interpersonal relationships. As one of the politicians I started this article with put it: the opioid crisis is a connection crisis. He went further and stated his belief that young people turn to devices first when they can’t find connection, and when that no longer works they turn to the next most accessible route to fill that void, which is street drugs. While this may sound a little overwrought and reflexively anti-tech, there is evidence to back it up. As Gurwinder recently pointed out in his excellent newsletter The Prism:
There’s a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction).
It doesn’t seem particularly far-fetched that future studies will show a link between sedentary lifestyles, poor nutrition, device addiction, and substance abuse. I learned it by watching you, all right….
It’s not my intention to moralize here. What does interest me, however, is the state of mind at the core of the scenario where synthetic drugs intersect with synthetic interactions; how it shifts one’s orientation by shutting off all sense of possibility related to the future. While we often refer to this as hopelessness or despair, it’s actually more like a form of blindness.
In some of our team’s work, we’ve talked about “fear of the future” and things like this Lancet study where 75% of participants between 16-25 say “the future is frightening.” Fear is one thing, but blindness is even more pernicious for those unwilling to reconcile with it and adapt. In a desperate enough state, the future fails to exist at all: we can neither imagine it, nor see it, nor even conceive of its possibility. We know, logically, that it may well offer a preferable alternative to the present, but we find ourselves unable to mentally trace its shape and outline options that might reassure us of its existence. Where there should be an image or concept, there is only a black frame. If you want to understand the real bleakness of addiction and depression, think about a lens cap that securely covers the mental apparatus we use to imagine future possibilities.
Thinking about this state of mind, I’m reminded of a passage I once read about Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s gambling addiction in Henri Troyat’s somewhat overwrought, but highly entertaining biography Firebrand. Troyat memorably describes a forlorn Fyodor trying to rescue his fortunes at the gaming tables in Hamburg:
He was sick with remorse. He tried to persuade himself that he was gambling to save his dear Anna and all his family in St. Petersburg from misery. But very soon he could no longer fool himself. It was only gambling that interested him. He loved gambling for its own sake. He lived only for that moment of intense anxiety when all eyes were focused on the spinning ball in its vertiginous course — red, black, even, odd. Win or lose. All existence hinged on the turning of the wheel. Pleasure and pain were always extremely intense and brief. He was bathed in sweat, he trembled, he no longer thought of anything. “I am always at the same point,” he wrote on May 20. “I go round in circles, I have achieved nothing, so that I cannot yet leave. What will tomorrow bring me?”
How is it that a mind — unquestionably one of the greatest in the history of literature — is unable to imagine a future that is preferable to the present? I mean, the man imagined worlds upon worlds and the interior lives of beings he built from scratch to such a degree that I can think for but a second and hear “The Underground Man” ranting from his St. Petersburg apartment. Dostoyevsky could make his characters feel real, but he couldn’t imagine a future for himself that didn’t end in ruin. Here, in a single twist, we can understand one of the cruelest aspects of the depressive mind.
It occurs to me that both the element of chance and the simulation of importance we find in gambling and a lot of digital culture play a role in this result. We lack the natural reciprocity of the physical world, where investments of time and energy are proportional to what we receive in return. In the actual world, we till the earth, plant a seed, water it, keep it free of disease and, eventually, we receive the fruit of our harvest. In the simulated world, it’s [simulated] fruit all the time — whether we want it or not. As Florence Shaw of the band Dry Cleaning puts it, “Do everything…and feel nothing.” Authors like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Lyandia Lynn Haupt have written thoughtful books outlining the challenges of maintaining balance amidst the synthetic, whiplash-inducing rhythms of our current, crisis-prone reality. Both have argued for a return to older forms of orientation toward the natural world.
I also think there’s something about future blindness that is self-perpetuating. The fewer of us that are inspired to create plausible positive futures, the harder it is for people to imagine those futures. When dystopian scenarios dominate the collective imagination, we make any alternative harder to see. And, as anyone who has endeavored to create a range of futures in a formal context will tell you, it’s far easier to imagine and render dystopian, worst-case scenarios than it is to bring to life something that feels both plausible and optimistic.
I read an excellent article by Cat Zheng a few years ago about the Japanese music genre of City Pop that flourished during the eighties. Through the mysteries of algorithmic matchmaking, City Pop has had a moment over the past few years, particularly with young listeners fascinated with its saturated portrayals of future possibility. Zheng goes deeper, however, and identifies what’s really at the heart of the genre’s resurgence:
Boom-era Japan, with its neon metropolises and abundant consumer freedoms, embodies a lost promise of capitalist utopia that was crushed in the ’90s by the country’s recession. By savoring its music, listeners can both indulge in and mourn the beautiful, naive optimism that seemingly defined the time—as well as its bracing visions of what would lie ahead. As one commenter on a YouTube city pop mix wrote, echoed by many others, “I miss the future.”
For our purposes here, we might re-work that line into something like I miss being able to imagine a future that isn’t apocalyptic, or I miss being able to imagine a future at all.
But we should also question if we’re looking for optimistic futures in the right places. In response to the Lancet research above, for example, our team sometimes asks those we present to whether or not they believe the lives of their children will be better than their own. When we ask this question of executive audiences, few hands go up. Interestingly, however, when I asked this question to a group of three-hundred young entrepreneurs from blue collar backgrounds at an event where I presented a few months ago, almost every hand in the room went up. At the risk of being sentimental, I’ll share that seeing those hands shoot up with confidence filled me with hope and energy. Tellingly, the only other audience where I’ve regularly encountered optimism is in the climate tech space.
It’s instructive, though, isn’t it? When we pay too much attention to dystopian scenarios that threaten our surroundings, we lose our ability to see plausible and optimistic futures. When we balance despair with optimistic possibilities, we feed not only our own mental health, but our collective imagination for what might come next.
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce” by Tom Wolfe, Esquire, December 1983
Listening: Pigments, by Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn and Goldie and the Kiss of Andromeda, by Adam Naas
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Friendly Evil Gangsta Synth Hip Hop” by mesostic via Wikimedia Commons
Closing Theme: “Hopes” by Kevin MacLeod via Wikimedia Commons
This is a really slick and well thought-out newsletter, so glad I stumbled upon it. Looking forward to reading more.