The Future Will Be Ordinary: Embracing the Mundane Ahead

Interest in "what the future will look like" has nearly doubled worldwide since 2020, according to search trends, flooding our lives with countless stories about what lies ahead.

Wherever we turn, intense visions of the future are presented to us. Some are optimistic or at least eager to market their version of the future, presumably for profit. Corporate strategists, clad in fleece jackets, deliver their impressive forecasts with such grand confidence it’s easy to assume that the dotted lines in their charts are as real as the solid ones. Our television screens bring hours of future-themed content—from heroic golden-age films and contemporary dystopian shows to countless documentaries portraying the future as a terrifying place. Meanwhile, religious storytellers continue to offer their own steady rhythms of salvation and prophecy.

We often disguise our ideas about the future as speculation, predictions, or projections, but fundamentally they are stories—assumptions and small fragments of life shared in hopes of validation or approval. Unfortunately, whether told through words, numbers, or images, the future is almost always depicted as a realm of extremes.

Each of us may find these extremes either disastrous or desirable, yet we tend to focus on the wildest scenarios, the sharpest peaks, and the thinnest edges of the bell curve. This habit serves us poorly and distracts us from reality. When the future arrives, it will not feel extreme; it will feel ordinary. Only our sense of what is ordinary will have shifted slightly.

Look around you: the present offers all the evidence we need.

As a child growing up in the 1980s, a watch told time and, if you were lucky, the date. Today, my watch monitors my pulse during sleep and can call emergency services if I faint. The first helium-neon laser cost $2 million to build at Bell Laboratories, yet I can now buy a laser pointer for a few dollars at a convenience store. There’s a robotic vacuum at my friend Andy’s house, my father is on Instagram, same-sex marriage is legal in nearly 40 countries, and I have Gore-Tex patches sewn into my heart.

Whether viewed through technological, political, scientific, or social lenses, many aspects of life today differ dramatically from what our grandparents knew. Yet these changes don’t feel extraordinary. They feel normal and familiar. We have absorbed them into our lives and regard them as typical parts of 2025. In a word, they seem mundane.

We tend to overlook the mundane, but despite our preferences, this is where the vast majority of life unfolds. Growing up in a damp, post-industrial English city, my worldview was shaped by the stories around me: saving all year for a week in the sun; beers on Friday, hangovers on Saturday, fried breakfasts on Sunday; messy divorces, handed-down jackets, flooded basements, scrap scams, kitchen haircuts, bus rides, bad dates, petty thefts, and suspicious pills.

Your life might be different, but these stories likely sound familiar in some way. Yet when we imagine the future, where do these stories go? What happens to these characters and the lives they live? Why don’t our future stories include tacos, handkerchiefs, pencils, and flat tires—and what might happen if they did? It’s hard not to think that our imagination about the future would shift if we included these everyday details.

Undoubtedly, major transformations await us in the future, but they won’t arrive with fireworks or a Hans Zimmer score. More likely, they will accumulate gradually alongside all the small things filling our lives now. They will appear in the fine print of toothpaste packaging, at the end of tax returns, in our vehicle insurance policies, and on Costco shelves.

Whether discussing artificial intelligence, climate change, robotics, or teen screen time, it’s easy—and lazy—to portray the future as a place of extremes. It’s far more challenging—but also more valuable—to consider how these forces might influence something as ordinary as walking the dog.

Humans are remarkably adaptable. We’ve proven highly capable of adjusting behavior and integrating new elements into the continuous fabric of daily life. Throughout my career, I’ve found that viewing the future as an ordinary experience—rather than a utopian fantasy or dystopian nightmare—helps people accept it, make sense of it, and engage in deeper conversations about what’s to come.

When contemplating the future, it’s important to leave room for grand plans and ambitious projects, and to warn about potential collapses or disasters. But that is only the beginning. While stories of radical change may inspire excitement or fear, they can also feel abstract. Without starting to see the future as a continuation of the present—and developing a persistent focus on how change affects the mundane rhythms of everyday life—the future will remain distant, intangible, and somehow “other.” This disconnect could become a critical failing of our generation.

Whether we are entrepreneurs planning mergers or everyday people chatting at a bar, the stories we tell each other about the future truly matter. It’s time for all of us to take an active role in shaping them.