You are not a 21st century misfit

At the end of July I flew to Italy to celebrate my dad’s birthday and to host the 4th episode of Material Mind, a series of events I started hosting in New Zealand and that now I’m slowly bringing to the rest of the world. This time, I hosted an intimate future co-authoring session around a wooden table set in the magical garden of my dear friend Nicolò’s villa in Treviso, Italy. The atmosphere that night was so powerful, I was in awe the entire time. Thinking about it still gives me shivers.

From Intimate future co-authoring night in San Biagio di Callalta, Treviso, Italy.

The next day, over lunch with my family, my dad asked, “So what actually happens at these dinners you are hosting?” I very mysteriously said “We imagine life, our lives, our own way” (I’m a big fan of ephemeral statements eheh) He pressed on: ‘So what do people actually take home?’ I laughed and said, ‘Well, nothing really… just a piece of paper with some silly drawings.’ Which, of course, sounded neither convincing nor is entirely true. There’s so much more happening there, but how do I frame it?

Let me give it a go.

We grow up going to school, knowing we need good grades and to be the best at as many subjects as possible. We study the book, answer the teacher’s questions, and get assessed on how well we’ve memorized it. University is often the same, unless you’re in some innovative, expensive private program, like the one with the tractor logo. Then, when we leave school and enter the job market, our thinking sounds more or less like: “based on my studies, this is the job I should get and if I don’t think this is a fit for me maybe I should study something else?”. If and once we get the job, this sort of modus operandi we applied in school repeats. In a way, we can say we tend to be trained into binarity, but if you step outside it’s clearly way more colorful than that.

The problem with this system, to different degrees depending on our background and education, is that it leaves us poorly equipped for the world we actually live in: one of global challenges, growing complexity, and political and economic paradigms being challenged by nature itself (and humans too? Just some of them). And all of this is happening on a very serious scale. Like it’s not a bubble ahah, it’s systemic. How can we approach such complexity with a black and white system? It just doesn’t apply. It makes us feel confused, hopeless, and lost. 

Let’s look into our beloved most disruptive technology that has ever come into fruition to the masses, AI. When chat GPT came out I was in Switzerland taking courses on machine “learning”, deep “learning”, struggling to survive the semester. I remember all of us in class being completely blown away, and, like students everywhere, we immediately started using it to write our essays (ahah, of course we did). Seemed like a brilliant idea, right? It saved us so much time. And within the classical approach to learning, where the goal is to get the right answer, to hand in the perfect polished responses to the professor’s questions, it quickly became our best friend, saving our lives from both lexical slips and academic failure.

If we think about it, that’s the highest form of our efficiency mastering, that is so easy. Wow technology really is making our lives easier. We have stopped washing our clothes, our dishes, driving the car, walking up the stairs, going grocery shopping, remembering phone numbers, writing letters, reading maps, waiting in line and so on. Now, we can finally stop writing, now we can finally stop thinking! :)

A recent MIT study on AI warns that short-term productivity gains come at the cost of diminished reasoning, imagination, and memory. They have been selling efficiency at the cost of our imagination, of our expression, creativity, invention. We are not that inventive anymore. And the most interesting part is that those companies selling us efficiently are also the ones that invest billions in imagination and creativity, to come up with the next essential product to have or to consume.

So when young people are showing such disillusion and hopelessness, when they feel lost and powerless faced with such contemporary global challenges, they partly feel it because they are actually living in a relatively dystopic time in history, but they have also been given black and white glasses when the world is full of colours. We cannot give up in front of complexity, we need to embrace it, but to embrace it we need to come to peace with the unknown, and the only way we can get there is by training our imagination. Because the more inventive and imaginative we are, the more the unknown becomes a space of play and revolution. That’s where you can come up with your own solution, your own story. Both personally, but also as a community of people living together.

I don’t think the world will be saved by avant garde technologies and performers. It’s not even about saving the planet but about reimagining how we live on it: how we relate to each other, to nature, to the unknown. Imagination allows us to turn fear into curiosity, uncertainty into possibility. That’s both the challenge and the gift of our time: not to control the destiny of the world, but to learn how to re-imagine a more harmonious and balanced co-existence, together.

So, Dad, what do people actually take home from Material and Mind? I think they might get home with a little spark in their heart. There is a place, there are people, there is a room in this world, where we think in colours and let the unknown be a space for imagination and authoring of the world we live in. There are many rooms of creators out there, they exist. That’s what they go home with. What does that mean? It means you should get closer to yourself. You are not a 21st century misfit.