Dear Readers:
I recently submitted an article to the Wall Street Journal for their regular Saturday “About Face” feature. The column chronicles how various professional have changed their minds. Unfortunately, my piece was rejected. Below is the editor’s short note back to me:
About Face: How a Futurist Changed His Mind and His Heart, Soul and Spirit
As life-altering as the event has been to my work as a strategic forecaster, one might think I’d know the exact date or, at least, the exact year it occurred. I know neither but, sometime around 2015, I was in St. Louis to deliver a keynote presentation to a large audience of professional engineers when I had what psychologists describe as a “disassociative episode.” I, however, experienced it as an “out-of-body” experience.
For 8 to 10 seconds, I was untethered to my physical self and felt myself to exist in an invisible, formless consciousness that rested just above my physical body. The sensation allowed me to look back down upon myself.
What is interesting is that I neither broke contact with my audience nor lost the thread of my message. When I returned to my body, the audience was unaware anything unusual had occurred but I was visibly shaken.
For the next few years, I quite literally pushed the experience from my mind and doubled down on my work. In the years that followed, I averaged between 80 and 100 speaking engagements a year. The only change anyone may have noticed is that I no longer paced the stage freely and instead stood behind a podium and used it as a sort of psychological crutch out of fear the experience would occur again. (It has not.)
It was only because of the pandemic-induced slowdown in my speaking schedule in 2020 that I began to seriously reflect upon the experience. Without dismissing the possible psychological foundations of the event, I came to the conclusion that some hidden part of my soul was seeking to express itself.
As a professional futurist, I never purposely mislead my audiences but I also only counseled them to view the future through the lenses of technological, political, economic, demographic and cultural change. The idea of using matters of the heart, soul and spirit as an additional filter to discern coming changes would have struck me as “woo-woo.” In time, I slowly came to view this oversight as something akin to a sin of omission.
I continue to believe technological progress in fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computers, robotics, synthetic biology, and material science will alter the economic, political and cultural landscape of the near future but so, too, with matters of the heart, soul and spirituality.
To use the advances of artificial intelligence as but one example, is it not possible that if AI eliminates millions of jobs, becomes a powerful new tool in the hands of authoritarian governments, or leads to any number of existential risks, the world may be headed toward a darker place? If so, just as past technological revolutions have led to spiritual revivals, could not the same possibility exist in the near future?
Alternatively, if the AI techno-optimists are right and society experiences extraordinary material abundance and physical comfort, might such good fortune also reveal a deep inner spiritual poverty within a great many people? If so, could not such longings lead to a wider-scale “awakening” and also become an equally powerful transforming agent on the world of tomorrow?
I do not claim to know or predict the precise direction such spiritual energies will take, I know only that I now have a professional responsibility to bring my whole self—mind, heart, soul and spirit–to my work.
Perhaps, this does not count as a complete “about face” and is, instead, an attempt to view the future from a healthier, more holistic 360-degree perspective.
Jack Uldrich is a professional futurist, keynote speaker, and author. He is a former naval intelligence officer, Defense Department official, and director of the Minnesota Office of Strategic and Long-Range Planning. He currently teaches a course on strategic foresight at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, MN.
