In the future, where might you be?

Grey Swan Guild
7 min readNov 25, 2020

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🏙️ | Credits: Darren Chan. — Image: Unsplash. | 🌆

For the last period now, I’ve been ruminating, on how this global unprecedented circumstance we are all facing is gonna play out.

It comes to my mind now and then, Coldplay Talk’s (2005) lyrics.
And they go something like this:

“Oh brother, I can’t, I can’t get through
I’ve been trying hard to reach you ’cause I don’ know what to do
Oh, brother, I can’t believe it’s true
I’m so scared about the future, and I wanna talk to you
Oh, I wanna talk to you.”

How many of us have felt that we have come a really long way in communication style-wise.
It all changed a few months ago, since the beginning of the year.

People that weren’t used to FaceTiming had to, quickly adapt to this new paradigm.

📱 Facetime, video call, zoom, meet, teams, hangouts, skpe, all early(forced)adopters. 💻

Talk, then goes on, and in the third verse slays with these really potent lines; feeling the momentum:

Are you lost or incomplete?
Do you feel like a puzzle, you can’t find your missing piece?
Tell me, how do you feel?
Well, I feel like they’re talking in a language I don’t speak
And they’re talking it to me.

🦢 GSG Catalyst Meeting, during November 2020. 🖥️

It’s crazy how someone that spent their last decade studying and forecasting possible future scenarios never thought about how this acceleration process would come to fruition.

We have been saying for the last five years - the future is here, but now companies and the complex systems moving the world are really saying:
“we’re experiencing and adapting for the next ten years, but now.”

🦠March 14 - 2020, one day after the pandemic was declared arriving in Uruguay. Image: Agustín Borrazás.🌫️

According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum:

“Digital transformation has been accelerated in many aspects of life — both professional and personal — as people have adapted to remote working and education, e-commerce is booming, and people are getting more of their recreational activities via the internet. A survey carried out early in the pandemic found that 32% of people in the US were arranging virtual parties with friends or family.”

Global Risks 🛑 10 Risks for the next 10 years. ⚠️ Report.

Pope Francis delivers a powerful message in his new recent encyclical,
Fratelli Tutti:

🕊️ Pope holds dramatic solitary service for relief from coronavirus. AP News. ☦️

“In today’s world, the sense of belonging to a single human family is fading, and the dream of working together for justice and peace seems an outdated utopia. What reigns instead is a cool, comfortable, and globalized indifference, born of deep disillusionment concealed behind a deceptive illusion: thinking that we are all-powerful while failing to realize that we are all in the same boat. This illusion, unmindful of the great fraternal values, leads to ‘a sort of cynicism’.

For that is the temptation we face if we go down the road of disenchantment and disappointment… Isolation and withdrawal into one’s own interests are never the way to restore hope and bring about renewal.
Rather, it is closeness; it is the culture of encounter.
Isolation, no; closeness, yes.
Culture clash, no; culture of encounter, yes”.

BioVYZR 1.0 — Personal Air Purifying Shield.

From now, the future is hard to imagine.
I always loved and tend to think of some sort of futuristic event.
I really love futurism.
Also, as in an apocalyptical and exegetical point of view. It’s really hard to imagine sometimes how it’s really
gonna be.

air. Microclimate.

Historian and philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari was one of the most consulted as soon the pandemic became widespread across all continents.

“I hope we remember this not only during this crisis but also once the crisis is over. That we take care to give students in school a good scientific education about what viruses, and the theory of evolution, are. And also, that when scientists warn us about other things besides epidemics, like about climate change and ecological collapse, we will take their warnings with the same seriousness that we now take what they say about the coronavirus epidemic.”

Aō Air. Atmōs.

I never thought 2020 to be such a disruptive year, could we even have been prepared? Are we really seeing the bigger, bigger picture?

What I thought throughout this year as trends emerged, and even beginning to understand over the last couple of years; is that
science fiction is actually now real science.

🐐When Humans Are Sheltered in Place, Wild Animals Will Play. Scientific American.🚶

En·core |(ˈänkôr) | noun, additional performance of an item at the end of a concert, as called for by an audience.

What in the world are we going to do?
Look at what everybody’s going through

What kind of world do you want it to be?
Am I the future or the history?

’Cause everyone hurts, everyone cries
Everyone tells each other all kinds of lies
Everyone falls, everybody dreams and doubts
Got to keep dancing when the lights go out

How in the world am I going to see
You as my brother, not my enemy?

’Cause everyone hurts, everyone cries
Everyone sees the color in each other’s eyes
Everyone loves, everybody gets their hearts ripped out
Got to keep dancing when the lights go out
Gonna keep dancing when the lights go out
Hold tight for everyday life
Hold tight for everyday life

At first light, throw my arms out, open wide
Hallelujah, hallelujah
Hallelu-halle-hallelujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah
Hallelu-halle-hallelujah
Yes

Coldplay — EveryDay Life, Live from Aman.

2020 has presented us all with reasons to evaluate what matters most to each of us. As we catch our collective breath and live our lives in the space between the known past and the unknowable future, we seek purpose.
We know we will need to change ourselves as we embrace a world of change. We think about what our own future will be, how we must change, how we can actively influence a new era and create impact.

https://www.greyswanguild.org/submitcontent

Grey Swan Guild is your platform and community to share your insights about our collective futures. It is your portal to a diverse world of 600+ brilliant people. This is your opportunity to be recognized as a thought leader around the world.
We invite your content submissions in October thru December or WAVE II’s Sensemaking cycle and to be considered for inclusion in upcoming publications and productions into early 2021.

Raise your hand. Raise your voice. Share your very own Point-Of-View.

Agustín Borrazás (Montevideo) is part of the RSI core team of the
Grey Swan Guild, along with Sylvia Gallusser (San Francisco), Kim Lindqvist (Stockholm), Dave Marvit (San Francisco), Dr. Sharon McIntyre (Vancouver), Vicki McLeod (Vancouver), Sean Moffitt (Toronto), Emily Watkins (San Diego), Bosco Anthony (Brisbane), Anna Hummel-Gumaelius (Sweden), Daniel Steiche (Ottawa) and Dominika Kopeć (Poland).
The team recently expanded to include representation from Singapore,
New York, London, Geneva, Mexico City, Melbourne, Seattle, Lisbon, Dallas, Nairobi, Mumbai, and over 45 countries.
There are more than 140 other thought-leaders around the world who support and inform our research, sensemaking, and intelligence efforts. Together, we’re a Global League of Sensemakers and if you are trying to make sense of this, too, join us! Okay.

Grey Swan Guild Members. Nov 2020.

Author Profile: Agustín Borrazás is a business developer and senior marketing professional with 15 years of experience. He started his first labor experience pulling pints and serving tables in Dublin and Limerick, Ireland.
After that, he came back to Uruguay to work at
Four Seasons Hotel in Carmelo as a Pool Bartender.

From 2007 to 2013, Agustín followed a contemplative divine call that took him to be a Trappist Monk candidate in Argentina, the United States, and Colombia. Serving others thru prayer, he embraced the cloistered life.

Back in the world, in 2014 he found that Instagram was lacking a notifications system and made the photo-sharing app update, launching an app called INTA.

Agustín established this 2020, Medianero Consulting. A Social Selling Agency focusing on LinkedIn.

He joined the core group of Grey Swan Guild in September. He’s been influencing for a few years now about Singularity and Transhumanism in his networks both in Uruguay and the USA.

He studied Social Communication, at Universidad Católica del Uruguay focusing on Advertising, and the same career again at Universidad de la República focusing in Audiovisual; both in Montevideo.

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Grey Swan Guild
Grey Swan Guild

Written by Grey Swan Guild

Making Sense of the World’s Biggest Challenges & Next Grey Swans — curating and creating knowledge through observation, informed futurism, and analysis🦢

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