Who Is The Future For, If Not The People Who Will Live In It?

There is a specific kind of slide you see at every forum. It is almost always blue. It almost always says 2050. Sometimes 2040, if the person on stage is feeling bold, or 2030 if they need the number to feel close enough to fund. On the slide there is a city that does not exist yet, a supply chain that will definitely work, a generation of children who will definitely be grateful. The person presenting the slide will, with near certainty, not be alive when the slide is supposed to come true.

Nobody in the room finds this strange.

Who is the future for?

The future used to be a place people walked into slowly. A farmer planted an olive tree knowing their grandchildren would eat from it. A cathedral was started by people who knew they would die before the roof went on. The word “future” carried time inside it. It was long because the life that built it was long.

Now the future is a keynote. It is a scenario. It is a slide deck with a CTA at the end. Someone at the top of their career, usually in their fifties, stands in a room full of other people in their fifties and tells the room what the world will look like in the year when most of us, the ones they are describing, will be running it.

We will not be in the room that day either.

The room, in numbers

The average age of a Davos attendee is 54 for men and 49 for women. Women make up roughly 22 to 28 percent of the delegation, depending on the year you count. Corporate membership to the forum that hosts it starts at around 75,000 dollars a year and climbs past 750,000 for strategic partners. A single delegate’s week there has been estimated at 40,000 dollars a person. Some sponsorships reach a million.

Meanwhile, 2.8 percent of parliamentarians globally are 30 or younger. Less than 1 percent are young women. More than half of the people alive today are under 30.

You can read those numbers as a problem of representation. That is the polite version. The honest version is that the people with the longest future are the furthest from the microphone.

What gets built when the builders will not live there?

Pause on this. There is a grammar problem buried inside every forum agenda.

The grammar goes: we, the grown, will design the future, for you, the young. You will receive it. You will be grateful. Your gratitude is the exit strategy.

But the future is not a deliverable. It is an inheritance. And inheritances have a strange property: the people who draft the will are almost never the people who have to live in the house.

The people designing the future are, statistically, the ones with the least of it left.

This is not meant as a moral accusation. Most of them are doing their best.

It is a structural fact. A 54 year old designing 2050 is designing a room they will visit as a tourist. A 22 year old designing 2050 is designing a home they will live in.

What kind of thinking does a long life ask for?

Philosophers used to have a word for this. Hans Jonas called it the imperative of responsibility: the scale of what modern humans can do to the world has outgrown the scale of the ethics we brought with us. The tools became planetary. The conscience stayed quarterly.

Longtermism, in its cleanest form, is the quiet insistence that people who do not yet exist still count. Intergenerational thinking is the practice of writing decisions as if the unborn could read them. Neither is a new idea. Neither is difficult to understand. Both collapse the moment the people in the room have already collected the return.

The problem is not that forums lack intelligence. The rooms are full of very smart people. The problem is that the clocks in the rooms do not match. A quarterly clock cannot see a grandchild. A five year strategic plan cannot feel a flood in 2071. A career that ends at retirement cannot carry the weight of a species that does not.

What would change if the clock in the room changed?

Imagine a forum where every seat on stage had a counter seat, and the counter seat was held by a person who would still be breathing in the year the slide referred to. This is what youth unmuted is trying to accomplish.

Imagine the 2050 slide had to be approved by someone who would be 45 then. Imagine the 2070 panel had to be shared with someone who would be 64 then, which is, right now, a 20 year old.

It is not a gimmick. It is a clock repair.

You do not need a majority. You need one chair in the room that refuses to pretend the future is a product. One chair whose presence makes the grammar harder. One chair that, just by sitting there, asks: who will live with what you are about to decide?

The uncomfortable question

The uncomfortable question is not whether the young should be in the room. Everyone will nod at that. The uncomfortable question is what the people currently in the room will have to give up when the young are actually there. An assumption. A time horizon. A comforting slide. A career’s worth of certainty that the future is something that happens to other people.

The future is not a market. It is not a scenario. It is not a keynote.

The future is the room twenty years from now, with a different person sitting in your seat, reading the minutes of this meeting and deciding whether you were a good ancestor.

The yellow chair is empty.

Who will live long enough to still sit in it when the future arrives?