Ok so I’ve mentioned briefly in a few previous newsletters the importance of expanding imagination and even some exercises on how to put this into practice for your own benefit.

Expanding your imagination of what’s possible directly impacts what kinds of futures you and others can have, and you have a moral imperative to exercise your imagination for good.

What’s the alternative?

Lacking the imagination to dream of what could be? Learned hopelessness? Pessimism? Apathy?

Nah, I think I’ll pass.

Quoting the Witcher, what has been need not always be.

But it takes energy to dream. And practice. It’s a skill, just like anything else.

And it’s worth it, because our dreams, thoughts and beliefs can occasionally change the way things pan out.

Imagining a playful future

So, with this preamble, one of the parts of my life I’ve always been reinventing and experimenting is work. It’s where I/most of us spend a shit ton of time, and not all of it is fun.

So I asked myself often, what else could this look like? Can I design this thing in my life to be more flow-state and less grinding? More creative, empathetic, and enjoyable?

And then, just a few months ago, I came across an insane question in the RADAR DAO (a DAO focused on futures building) - what if the future of our work was play?

The question was so optimistic and ridiculous, but it’s been living rent-free in my head ever since I realized that it’s already happening.

We see this take the form of influencers in Instagram and YouTube. You can make money by posting videos of yourself doing weird dances, doing grwm videos of you doing your hair, or talking about skincare products you like.

Of course, not all of us would characterize our current day jobs as “play.” It seems a little implausible to think that we could get paid to have fun and exercise large enough quantities of creativity and enjoyment to characterize it as “play”.

But I wonder if this is a classic case of “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

The tools have arrived for us to make work playful. We may not all be able to or be willing to take this jump, but I wonder if this will be the case for most of us in the future.

I mean, just look at this newsletter. I write about topics that are a little eccentric, have no clear through line, and yet it exists for free. I don’t pay to run any servers, I don’t pay anyone to manually send my email to people, and I don’t pay to advertise it. You don’t pay to read it. Yet it exists.

You might argue that I’m not getting paid for this and so it’s not really viable “work” - I still need my day job to pay the bills. But there are plenty of people who are getting paid to write newsletters, podcasts, or Instagram accounts like this.

The blessing can also be the curse

Now, as some of you may know from experience, if you make work your play, your play can become work.

What I mean is, if I love playing the violin for fun but I started making my living playing the violin on YouTube, playing the violin might eventually become a source of stress instead of leisure.

So when I say the future is play, I don’t mean that we’ll live in a utopia.

It just means that work will less and less resemble assembly-line type of work. It will require more creativity, more thoughtfulness, more originality, and more value.

It’s not a coincidence that there’s an entirely new workforce dubbed “the creators”.

These creators will be (are) the new workforce. Which goes back to one of the motifs of this newsletter - the belief that as humans, we must find ways to create and not just consume.

For those who do experiment with making work playful, tech enables scalable discoverability, authenticity and patronage.

Truly unique human creativity will become a new currency, especially in the age of AI where basic tasks that can be automated will be.

To quote Kevin Kelly, (futurist, cofounder of WIRED, also built a clock that will last 10,000 years) “when copies are superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.”

Trust, reputation and authenticity are examples of things that can’t be copied, and the creators who create that will succeed.

Photo of the day

Weird new AI thing of the day

Whoop is a wearable that customizes workouts, nutrition planning, mindfulness exercises, and other tasks that a Silicon Valley executive would pay a fitness guru for.

I wonder if your biometric data is shared with OpenAI? 🤔 🤔 

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Until next time,

🫡