When did you last hear anyone look forward to the future?
Not to the holidays. Not to the weekend. To the future. To what comes in ten years, in thirty, to the place where your children are going to live, and their children after them.
I tried to remember it today - and I had to go a long way back.
When I was a boy in Sorø in the 80s, the year 2026 was a place. Not a year. A place you were headed. There would be space shuttles and robots and things that flew, and we drew it at school and talked about it at the dinner table, and none of us had any doubt that it would be better to be there than it was to be here.
And it wasn't because here was bad - Sorø was, and is, among the loveliest and most peaceful places in the country. Here was fine. But we lived in a current - forward. We were always talking about "when". When we grow up. When it's the year 2000. When I've bought my first Porsche. When I've landed the cute blonde girl from 7C and we live together in a cool house. With a SWIMMING POOL. When, in the future, any minute now, we've solved this... how wonderful it'll be!
When.
And I know what some of you are thinking. So let me get ahead of it, so I don't have to get it thrown at me in two seconds.
"You were just a kid back then. Naive. You didn't understand the world. And you lived a sheltered life. You don't understand how scared we were."
But I do. I know that's how people felt, at the same time. And it's true. The future wasn't without darkness back then. The Doomsday Clock stood at three minutes to midnight. The Day After was shown on television, and the whole country talked about it the day after. There was a hole in the ozone layer, the forests were dying, there were enough nuclear bombs to put us all out five times over.
I'm writing it anyway - because it wasn't the same.
"So what's the difference, Thomas?"
The difference is that the bomb was a threat AGAINST the future. The future itself was good. There was just something that could stop it from arriving. Naturally, we worried about that threat.
Today it's been turned around.
The future itself has become the threat.
Nobody is afraid that something will ruin the year 2050. They are afraid OF the year 2050. The climate, the collapse, artificial intelligence, migration, the war, the debt, the emergency kit with three days of tinned mackerel in the cupboard, the prime minister saying that it's about as serious as it can get.
It isn't one threat. It's a weather. And that's what you're feeling, if you're feeling that something is off. You're living in a weather where "tomorrow" is something you have to survive, and not somewhere you're going. And certainly not something you should - or are allowed to - look forward to.
And notice where the threat comes from.
Back then it came from OUTSIDE. From Moscow. From an adversary with a face and an address, and an adversary is something you can fight, negotiate with, outlast. Today the threat comes from WITHIN. It's your consumption. Your flights. Your car. Your children. Your existence. The enemy has been replaced by guilt.
And guilt - that's an entirely different thing to live with. An enemy can be defeated. Guilt can only be atoned for.
So here we are, in a culture that has to atone every single day without ever being able to be forgiven. And a culture like that cannot - must not - believe in the future, because the future is the bill. It isn't a place you arrive. It's something you have to pay for.
That's why you never hear anyone say it anymore - THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT.
You can probably feel it just from me writing this.
The future IS bright.
We are on our way somewhere MUCH BETTER.
"How can he write that? Doesn't he know..." - and then your inner lists start up, everything you've learned is going wrong and how bad things are. Irreparable. Dangerous. Unless there's a little less of you. And of me.
Am I right?
How did we end up here?
What we call "the faith in progress" was never something the Enlightenment came up with. The idea that history - our Shared Story - is going somewhere, that time is a line with a direction and a good ending, doesn't exist among the Greeks, it doesn't exist among the Hindus, it doesn't exist in any of the old cyclical worldviews where everything simply comes round again. It exists in one place.
In the Judeo-Christian story, where time begins with a Word and ends with a wedding feast.
"Oh no, here he goes again, God help us..."
And yes, I do. Because it matters that just a few of you catch this one.
The West took that line - but removed God from the end of it and called it Progress.
And it worked. For two hundred years it worked, because the fruit holds for a couple of generations after the root has been cut. We lived off that fruit. I was born in 1974 and I grew up in the last years of it.
But then it withers. And what we're experiencing now isn't that the future has grown darker. It's that we kept one half of the story - and threw out the other.
We kept "the Judgement". We lost "the Resurrection".
Look at the climate story. It has a sin, CO2. It has a judgement, two degrees. It has an apocalypse, with dates. The only thing it doesn't have is an Easter morning.
Look at the collapse stories. Same structure.
Look at the doomsday talk about artificial intelligence. Same structure.
Apocalypse means revelation. And in the original version, what is revealed - and I don't know if you've ever thought about this - IS THAT IT ENDS WELL.
The modern world read the book three quarters of the way through - and then we closed it.
And then all that's left is the crisis and the attempt to avert the catastrophe.
But let's take one more fair objection here, one I know is burning in the fingers of some of you.
Yes. I often write about some of what threatens us myself. About Europe, about Islam, about what's happening in France and Sweden and the Netherlands. So what's the difference between me and the weather I've just described?
The difference isn't WHETHER you name the danger. The difference is whether there's a door.
Naming something so it can be dealt with is the opposite of fear. Fear is what you get when things are named without a way through them. That is to say, the Judgement without the Resurrection. I wrote it a few weeks ago, and it still holds -
"Fear is, what if... Faith is, even if..."
What I'm trying to do here today is simply lift that sentence from the individual - me - up to all of us.
Because there's also a mechanism, and it needs to be said really loudly - not as conspiracy - but as architecture.
FEAR is the only feeling that pays both the media and the powers that be. It sells clicks, and it grants a mandate. "A crisis" is the cheapest power of attorney there is, and it never has to be redeemed, only extended.
Feel it like this -
A population that is afraid can be governed.
A population that hopes is free.
Nobody decided it should be like this. It's just how the system rewards those who serve it. And that's why you hear about everything that can go wrong, around the clock, and NEVER anymore about everything that can go right.
It isn't because the latter doesn't exist. It's because it can't be used for anything. By anyone. Other than to shoot down those who dare to say they believe tomorrow will be better than today.
Even that can win you votes.
"Listen to him - how naive is a person allowed to be! Vote for us instead, we'll keep you safe from the future."
And the body knows it. You can hear what a people believes about tomorrow by counting its children. In that sense a child is the most concrete ballot for the future there is, and in Denmark today a woman has one and a half children. In 2008 it was almost two.
For a people to carry itself on, it has to be 2.1, and we haven't been there since the end of the 1960s. It isn't because we can't. Women can still have children, particularly at the age their bodies are designed for it. It's because we don't dare. The body votes, and it votes against everything we say about ourselves.
And yet - last year the number rose slightly for the first time in several years. A little. But it rose. So somebody out there still believes in tomorrow, even though nobody asked them to. Who do they think they are? They're bound to be right-wing and dangerous.
So what will it take?
Not optimism. Optimism is just a forecast with a smile, and it lasts until the next news bulletin.
Here's what I think we've forgotten.
When we looked forward to the future back then, it was never a forecast. It was a promise. A forecast can be good or bad, and there's always a new one tomorrow. But NOBODY has ever got up in the morning for a forecast.
You get up for a promise.
And Christian hope is the only one I know of where the ending has already happened. That's why it's the most future-facing faith in the world. Not because it guesses better than the others. But because it knows how the story ends, because it already ended on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem, and everything that comes after, including what you're afraid of right now, is something that happens on the way Home.
Naturally I can't prove that to you. I've never claimed to. And I would never try. But I can point to where it stood before we lost it, and I can tell you that it hasn't disappeared. It just hasn't been mentioned in a while.
Hope.
So look forward. To tomorrow, to next year, to your children and their children. Not because the numbers say you can. But because Man cannot stand upright in reality without believing in something - and you are Created to stand.
Upright.
The darkness is a forecast.
The morning is a promise.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good weekend, friends ☀️
...
Oh, and by the way. A friend of mine came by from the UAE today with a kandura under his arm, and I tried it on while he stood laughing in the kitchen. Not for fun. Well, yes, also for fun. But mostly because I wanted to feel what it's like to come from a place that has everything against it, desert, heat, a law lying over the whole thing, and which NONETHELESS has drawn up a plan for the year 2071 and is building as if they believe in it. No excuses. No shame. Forward, in the belief that the future will be better if you decide it will be and create it that way.
They don't have any more to look forward to than we do.
On the other hand, they have the clowns in Iran as neighbours.
At least we only have Swedes.
