Subscribe now

You know the ones.

The older manager, frustrated, watching younger employees walk away and quietly questioning their professionalism, their commitment, whatever happened to just sticking it out.

Gen Z asking how they’re supposed to gain experience when nobody will give them a real shot at it - while also asking why work should cost them their values in the first place.

And somewhere in the middle, the millennial trying to pivot careers with a nervous system that’s basically been running on static for a decade, caught between a generation that normalised long hours and face time in the office, and another one demanding flexibility, boundaries, and a softer kind of leadership.

We laugh because there’s something recognisable in all of it. I’ve laughed at these memes too, more than once, mid-scroll, half-guilty about it.

But lately I’ve been wondering: how on earth did we get here?

And, maybe more importantly: what happens when all these generations have to build the future of work together, whether they’re ready to or not?

A Small Experiment

So I tried something.

I brought together people with different generational perspectives and asked them to imagine themselves working in 2035.

Where are you living? What does your work actually look like, day to day? Who are you working with? Do you have a team? What problem are you spending your energy trying to solve?

The point wasn’t to predict which jobs will exist in ten years. Nobody can really do that with a straight face. It was just to get people out of the present for a moment. To imagine themselves inside a different world, if only for twenty minutes.

And then I asked one question that changed the entire conversation:

How are you working with other generations?

That’s when things got interesting.

The comments started coming in, a little defensive at first, the way honest comments often are.

“To be fair, sometimes it’s hard to even work with people from my own generation.”

“Kids don’t want to work.”

“We don’t want to inherit the workaholism of millennials.”

“We’re not given opportunities to learn. It doesn’t feel safe to fail.”

Different frustrations. Different assumptions. Different, quietly held versions of what work is even supposed to be.

But I started wondering whether we were all missing something underneath it.

What if this was never really a generational problem?

What Happens When You Actually Talk

As part of the same exercise, I asked participants to go find someone from another generation and actually talk to them about some of these questions.

Something shifted.

People started discovering the reality behind the opinion. Because it’s easy to judge someone’s choices when you’ve never had to stand inside the world that shaped them.

Someone who entered the workforce decades ago may have genuinely learned that staying late was how you proved you cared. Someone entering it today sees the exact same behaviour and quietly wonders why exhaustion ever became something to be proud of.

Someone believes young people need to “pay their dues,” the way they did. The young person, meanwhile, is wondering how am I supposed to learn anything if I’m never trusted with enough responsibility to actually fail at it?

Neither perspective came from nowhere.

Our relationship with work was shaped by the economy we happened to enter, the technology we grew up with, what our parents modelled at the dinner table, what opportunities were actually on the table for us, and what we were quietly taught a successful life was supposed to look like.

Maybe change has just happened too fast for any of us to fully catch up on what it did to each other in the process.

What’s Really Underneath the Judgment

Behind the judgment, I think there’s something else sitting there, mostly unspoken.

Fear.

Fear of asking for help and looking like you don’t already know. Fear of offering help and having it waved away. Fear of becoming unemployable in a world that keeps changing the rules mid-game. Fear of being judged. Fear of being challenged. Fear of failing, publicly, where people can see.

And maybe, underneath all of that, the quiet fear that the rules we spent years carefully learning simply don’t apply anymore.

That last one feels particularly heavy to me.

Because the future of work conversation usually gets pulled toward technology - AI, automation, new skills, new job titles nobody’s heard of yet. But underneath all of that sits a much more human, much less comfortable question:

What happens when the assumptions that made us successful stop being true?

Maybe the Cycle Needs to Break

Not because one generation has finally cracked the code on how work should be. None of us has. Anyone who tells you they have is selling something.

But because the workplace we’re actually moving toward is going to ask something different of all of us, whether we volunteer for it or not.

The era of authority based purely on age or tenure probably needs to loosen its grip a little. Younger generations can genuinely benefit from people who’ve already navigated organisations, crises, and messy careers before them; that experience is real and it’s valuable. But experience can’t keep hiding behind “this is how we’ve always done it,” as if that sentence were an argument instead of just a habit.

At the same time, new talent brings energy, different expectations, and fresh eyes on old problems. But challenging old systems gets a lot easier once you actually understand why those systems existed in the first place - not just that they’re old, but why someone built them that way.

What we need isn’t less generational hierarchy exactly, but more reciprocal learning. Experience flowing one way. New perspective flowing the other. And somewhere in the middle, both sides willing to actually change, not just wait for the other side to.

Because if you strip away the labels, most people are trying to do roughly the same thing. Build a decent life. Make some progress. Feel useful. Support the people they love. Find a bit of stability.

The Easy Story vs. The True One

There are real systemic problems underneath all of this, of course. Housing. Wages. Inequality. Technological disruption. Uneven access to opportunity. None of that gets solved by generational empathy alone, and I don’t want to pretend it does.

But blaming another generation can become a very convenient distraction from those harder, less satisfying questions. And social media makes that distraction almost effortless.

A complicated, tangled reality gets flattened into three neat little stories:

Boomers don’t get it.

Millennials are burnt out.

Gen Z doesn’t want to work.

Three tidy sentences. None of them particularly useful. All of them a little bit true and mostly wrong.

A Different Question to Ask

We need to flip the script.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with the generation after me?” Let’s ask: “What happened in their world that makes them see work so differently than I do?”

And then one step further:

“What can they see about the future that I genuinely can’t?”

The future of work isn’t going to belong to Gen Z. Or Millennials. Or Gen Alpha, still mostly in school, watching all of this from a distance.

It’s going to be built in the overlap between generations, which should be the opportunity, not the obstacle.

We don’t have to inherit every rule we were handed. But we don’t have to throw out everything that came before us either.

We get to choose what’s actually worth carrying forward. And what’s finally, quietly, time to leave behind.

A Question for You

Think about someone at least one generation away from you.

What’s one belief they hold about work that genuinely frustrates you?

Now the harder question, the one that actually costs something to ask honestly:

What might have happened in their world to make that belief completely rational?

Maybe that’s where a different conversation about the future of work actually begins.

Share

Over the past few weeks, I had the privilege of working with talented young professionals from across Mexico, and what they built together genuinely inspired me.

Across projects ranging from AI governance to longevity, sustainability, and superapps, I saw the same pattern again and again: curiosity, teamwork, resilience, critical thinking, empathy, and an impressive ability to navigate ambiguity.

What mattered most wasn’t just the deliverables, it was how they worked: truly listening to one another, debating with respect, turning uncertainty into concrete ideas, and growing in confidence and collaboration every single day.

That’s what I wrote in the moment, but the more I sat with it, the more I realised I hadn’t actually explained why it moved me. So I want to go back and tell the full story.

The Experiment

What happens when you put 20 young professionals who have never met before, into different teams and ask them to solve a problem they’ve never encountered?

You give them two weeks. No classroom. No predefined answer. No carefully selected teammates.

Just a real question from a small business, and a challenge underneath it: how would a new generation approach a problem we’re most likely going to face in the future?

I wanted to find out.

I was surprised by the quality of their deliverables, even though they were entry level talent. But the most surprising thing happened along the way.

I Deliberately Created Friction

The participants were roughly the same age, but they came from different backgrounds, disciplines, and corners of Mexico. They didn’t know each other.

They had to work remotely. And I gave them problems that were intentionally open-ended.

They had to figure out how to communicate, divide responsibilities, make decisions, disagree, sit with uncertainty, and eventually produce something they could actually stand behind.

It wasn’t always comfortable.

Some struggled with communication. Some couldn’t quite coordinate schedules and busy lives. Some weren’t sure who should take the lead, and that silence sat there for longer than anyone wanted.

One participant described a moment where two completely different visions of the problem had to be negotiated before the team could move forward at all, neither side fully right, neither fully wrong. Another went through what she called a real organisational crisis, when teammates weren’t showing up the way she’d expected them to. Someone else told me that they’d worried taking initiative and creating structure before anyone asked would come across as overstepping.

It would be easy to file these moments under “problems in the learning experience.” I’ve started to think they are the learning experience.

We’ve Gotten Very Good at Removing Friction From Learning

We design courses with clear instructions. We create individual assignments. We hand people rubrics. We teach a skill, then test whether they remember it.

We ask candidates in interviews:

“Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership.”

“Tell me about a time you dealt with ambiguity.”

“Give me an example of teamwork.”

But there’s a problem hiding inside that format.

You can talk about leadership without ever actually leading. You can describe how you manage conflict without having resolved one. You can say how adaptable you are without ever having to adapt when the plan quietly falls apart underneath you.

This experiment made that gap impossible to ignore.

When I asked participants which skills were hardest to demonstrate in traditional interviews, the answers were strikingly consistent. Leadership. Adaptability. Confidence. Real teamwork. Working under pressure. Conflict resolution. Uncertainty management. Critical thinking.

As one participant put it, these are skills that are “more noticeable in action than in prepared responses.”

Exactly that.

Something Changes When the Problem Is Real

The teams weren’t completing an exercise for the sake of completing an exercise. There was a real client, with a real question, waiting for them. That changes the psychology of the whole thing.

Suddenly communication isn’t a soft skill on a checklist. If you don’t communicate, the work simply doesn’t move. Leadership isn’t a line you claim on LinkedIn - someone has to actually step up when nobody knows what to do next, and it’s rarely comfortable when they do. Critical thinking isn’t a multiple-choice question; you have to decide, in real time, which assumptions are worth challenging.

And uncertainty becomes the specific, physical feeling of standing at a fork with several possible directions and no idea which one will work.

And Then Something I Didn’t Expect Happened

The teams started connecting - for real, not just professionally.

First there was friction. Then negotiation. Then, somewhere in there, trust.

Participants told me they were surprised by how quickly they adapted, despite not knowing each other and working entirely remotely. They learned from different ways of thinking. They discovered perspectives that had nothing to do with their own academic backgrounds. They started noticing and valuing the different strengths across their teams.

One participant admitted she’d assumed her teammates would be annoyed that she’d moved ahead and built structure without asking. Instead, they were grateful for it. Another told me, almost surprised at himself, that he discovered he could actually lead under pressure, when it mattered. Another described learning to accept multiple opinions instead of quietly defending her own. And one reflected that being surrounded by people from different academic backgrounds stopped him from getting too attached to the one perspective his own education had handed him.

That’s a very different kind of learning outcome than a grade or a certificate.

The project didn’t just produce a deliverable. It produced new relationships, new confidence, and new stories about who these people could become - stories they hadn’t had access to two weeks earlier.

Maybe the Future Skills Problem Is Actually a Learning Design Problem

We spend a lot of energy talking about the skills young people need for the future. AI literacy. Critical thinking. Creativity. Adaptability. Leadership. Communication. Systems thinking.

But how do we teach these skills? Maybe we should be asking “what experiences force people to develop them?” Sometimes you have to put someone in a room where there’s no obvious leader, and let them figure out, uncomfortably, what to do next.

And yes, that can get messy. It can be frustrating. People misunderstand each other. Someone misses a meeting. Someone disagrees with the direction and says so, awkwardly, in the group chat. Someone takes too much ownership. Someone doesn’t take enough.

But those moments create something a perfectly designed classroom almost never can: the need to act.

The Goal Isn’t to Remove Friction. It’s to Make Friction Productive.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an argument for throwing people into chaos and calling it learning.

The participants also told me, honestly, what could have been better. They wanted clearer onboarding. More clarity around expectations and deliverables. Better communication structures from the start. More opportunities for feedback during the process, not just at the end. Some wished they’d had a little more time to build trust with their teammates before diving straight into the work.

This matters. The lesson that we need to get better at telling the difference between productive friction and unnecessary friction.

Technical confusion isn’t learning. Poor instructions aren’t learning. Nobody grows from not knowing where to click.

Maybe This Is What Learning Should Look Like

I started this experiment wanting to understand how young professionals might approach future-facing problems.

I ended up learning something else entirely. The most interesting output wasn’t the final presentation. It was watching people quietly become different versions of themselves over two weeks.

A participant who discovered she could lead. Someone who became more confident saying what he actually thought, out loud, in front of strangers. Someone who learned to work comfortably across disciplines she’d never touched before. Someone who got a little more at ease with not knowing the answer yet. Someone who realised, maybe for the first time, that her perspective wasn’t the only valid one in the room. Someone who discovered that collaboration doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone - sometimes it means disagreeing well.

And maybe most importantly: people who started as complete strangers and ended the experience feeling like they’d built something together. Something they were proud enough of to keep talking about after it was over.

That’s why I keep coming back to this idea of friction.

We shouldn’t design learning environments that make everything easy. We should design environments where the difficult parts are worth struggling through - where the struggle itself is the point, not an obstacle to it.

Maybe the future of learning isn’t about preparing people for uncertainty by handing them more answers.

Maybe it’s about giving them enough real uncertainty to discover, on their own terms, that they can navigate it.

To every participant: thank you for your energy and your talent. What you built is more than a project - it’s a signal of the leadership and potential emerging across the LATAM region.

If you’d like to know more, or know someone who might benefit from an experience like this, reach out. I’d love to tell you more. 🚀

Participant reflections and quotes throughout this piece are drawn directly from post-program feedback collected after the Lifelong Learners LATAM cohort.

Subscribe now

The last time I went to the office, I got stuck in traffic for an hour and forty-three minutes. I remember the exact time because my climate wallet buzzed halfway through that soft, apologetic chime it makes.

0.007 tonnes CO₂ deducted.

I was already annoyed. The kind of annoyed that has nothing to do with carbon and everything to do with a stalled car and a podcast that had ended twenty minutes ago.

Then my mother called.

She wanted to know if I was coming for dinner on Sunday. I said yes. She asked if I was driving. I said probably. She sighed - the specific sigh she reserves for things she’s decided not to actually fight about.

“Don’t waste your carbon on me.”

She was joking…mostly.

That was 2031. I was twenty-nine. And, although we didn’t know it yet, that was probably the last year of the office as I had known it - fluorescent lights, badge scanners, the particular smell of the coffee machine on the third floor that never quite got fixed.

I’m 34 now. I haven’t had a permanent desk in five years. Neither has anyone I work with.

My company still keeps a building in Mexico City. It’s beautiful, actually - more beautiful than any office I worked in before. Plants everywhere. Rooms you can rearrange depending on what you’re doing. A kitchen that’s always stocked, always warm, always someone’s mom-approved recipe simmering in there.

But nobody goes because they have to.

You go because you want to see someone. Because you’re working on something that’s easier to do in the same room. Or because you’ve been staring at your kitchen wall for three days and need proof that other humans still exist, still laugh at things, still spill coffee on important documents.

Most of my work happens from home. Some of it happens walking around the neighbourhood, phone in one hand, dog leash in the other. Some of it happens in a virtual room with people I’ve never met in person and probably never will. And some of it happens sitting across from a stranger who has just told me they might have to leave the only home they’ve ever known.

That’s my job.

Or, at least, that’s what my job became, somewhere along the way, without anyone quite deciding it.

This morning I’m at the kitchen table, still in yesterday’s t-shirt, when my assistant tells me I have a problem.

Not my assistant, exactly. My AI. We stopped giving them human names a few years ago - it started to feel strange, talking to “Sofia” like she might mind if I was short with her. Mine just calls itself M. I never asked why.

M tells me one of my clients is about to make a mistake.

The client is a family in Guadalajara. They have 1.1 tonnes of carbon left in their annual budget. They’re thinking of selling 700 kilograms. At today’s price, that’s a decent amount of money - enough to matter.

M has already found a buyer. It could execute the transaction in under a minute, the way it does everything, quietly and without fuss.

I ask why it thinks the transaction is a problem.

It pulls up their energy consumption. Their household expenditure. Their historical data. Then something else.

Their air-conditioning usage has dropped by 63%. That’s unusual in Guadalajara, where the heat doesn’t really negotiate.

I call them.

The woman who answers sounds embarrassed before I’ve even asked anything, like she already knows what I’m going to say. She tells me they’ve stopped using the air conditioning because electricity costs too much now. Her father has asthma. Her son sleeps badly when it gets hot - wakes up three, four times a night, and she can hear him through the wall.

They could sell the credits. They could make good money. Technically, they’ve reduced their emissions.

But have they actually become more sustainable? Or have they just become poorer, and the numbers happened to line up in their favour?

I sit there with the phone still warm against my ear, looking at the screen.

M has no problem with the transaction. The numbers work. The verification works. The market works exactly the way it’s supposed to.

And somehow it still feels wrong in a way I can’t fully explain, even to myself.

This is the part of my job no machine has managed to automate. Knowing when something can be done doesn’t mean knowing whether it should be done. I wish someone had told me, years ago, that this - this exact, uncomfortable in-between - would be the actual work.

I leave the house at 10:15 to meet someone for coffee. The journey costs me almost nothing - not financially, carbon-wise. Public transport is heavily subsidised now, and the city has changed in ways I still notice, even after years of it being normal.

People still talk about the Black Summer. Forty-seven consecutive days above 38°C. At the time, we thought the number was shocking - unthinkable, even. Now it’s just something my generation uses as a marker.

Before Black Summer.

After Black Summer.

The way older generations talk about COVID, or their parents talk about a peso crisis that still shapes how they save money, decades later.

Climate change stopped being something we read about in articles we meant to finish later. It became something we organised our lives around, the way you organise around a chronic illness in the family - always there, sometimes quiet, occasionally impossible to ignore.

The person I’m meeting is Mariana. She’s from a community in Oaxaca. Her family has been part of the carbon market since the beginning, back when none of us fully understood what we were building.

When the government introduced the national carbon budget, her community suddenly had something valuable: credits. They’d historically produced very little carbon - no cars, no factories, no air conditioning running through the night. People in Mexico City and Guadalajara produced a lot.

So the market did what markets do. It connected them.

At first, everyone was excited. Then people started asking harder questions. Why were communities with less money selling their unused emissions to people with more? Why was poverty being counted as environmental virtue? Why should someone who couldn’t afford a car sell the right to someone who owned three?

The arguments got ugly, in the way arguments do when they’re really about something else.

Mariana doesn’t love talking about it. She stirs her coffee a little too long before she answers.

“The money helped my community,” she says. And she’s right. It paid for solar panels. Water infrastructure. A proper school, finally, instead of the one with the roof that leaked every rainy season.

But then she says something I still think about, weeks later.

“We became rich in something because we were poor in everything else.”

I don’t have a clever response to that. So I don’t try to give one. I just let it sit there between us, next to the coffee going cold.

After lunch, I have a session with a group of families from Tabasco. They aren’t really my clients anymore, not in the traditional sense.

My team works with people considering whether to move because of climate risk. It sounds strange, saying it plainly like that, but climate migration has become just another part of life, another decision people make at the kitchen table.

Where should we raise our children?

Will there be enough water in ten years?

Will this town still be here?

Can we even afford to stay?

The models are genuinely incredible. I can show a family what their region might look like in five, ten, fifteen years: flood risk, heat, water availability, employment, housing, schools, all of it mapped out with unsettling precision.

Except whether someone is ready to leave the place where their grandparents are buried. That, the model can’t touch.

Today, a man in his fifties keeps looking at the map on the screen, not really seeing it. Finally he says, almost to himself:

“But my father is buried here.” And suddenly all the data in the world feels very, very small.

At four, I run an Urgent Optimism session. The name still makes some people laugh, and honestly, it made me laugh too, the first time I heard it.

A group of us came up with it years ago, tired of climate conversations that left everyone either terrified into silence or numb past caring. So we started asking a different question. Not:

How bad could this get?

But:

What could we still change?

We use scenarios. We imagine different versions of 2040, argue about them, draw them on whiteboards, disagree loudly and then apologise and then disagree again.

The AI generates possible futures based on what we feed it. Then the people in the room tear them apart, one by one.

Someone says the model doesn’t understand how people actually behave under pressure. Someone else says it’s completely missed the role of migration in the next decade. An older woman tells us, not unkindly, that the model doesn’t know the river.

Everyone laughs, because we’ve heard this before and we still love hearing it.

Then she starts explaining the river anyway. Where it used to flood. Where it floods now. Which families moved because of it. Which crops disappeared. Which road becomes impossible after three days of rain, the one her son used to take to school.

The AI has thousands of pages of data.

She has lived there for sixty years.

Both are useful. Neither is enough on its own.

It’s almost 7 when I finish. I don’t have to commute home. I’m already home - have been, technically, all day.

I make dinner, badly, the way I always do when I’m distracted. My brother sends a message asking whether I want to go to Mexico City next month. I check my climate wallet. I have enough.

But I hesitate.

Not because I can’t afford the trip. Because I’ve started thinking about carbon differently than I used to, and I’m not sure I like what that says about me.

That’s perhaps the strangest thing the whole system did to us. It turned something invisible into something personal. Every flight has a number now. Every journey has a cost you can actually see. Every purchase asks you, quietly, almost gently:

Is this worth it to you?

Sometimes I hate that question. Sometimes I think it’s exactly what we needed all along, and we just didn’t know how to ask it before.

I still don’t know which. Maybe both.

At 9:30, I get one final notification. The carbon exchange has moved again. 380 pesos per kilogram. M recommends selling.

I tell it no.

“Why?” it asks, and there’s something almost human in the way it asks, though I know that’s just good design.

I don’t answer right away.

Because honestly, I don’t fully know. Maybe I’m saving the credits for something I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe I’m uncomfortable with the idea of selling them, the way you’re uncomfortable selling something that used to just be air. Maybe I’m still trying to work out what responsibility even means, now that everyone has a price attached to their exhale.

I close the screen. Sit in the quiet for a minute.

Tomorrow I’ll have another meeting. Another family. Another conversation where the data will tell us what’s likely to happen, and someone will have to help decide what’s fair.

I think about that office from 2031. The traffic. The fluorescent lights that hummed just slightly too loud. The meeting rooms with their whiteboards covered in half-erased ideas. The emails that could have been a two-minute conversation. The people sitting at desks because that was simply, unquestionably, what work looked like.

We spent so much time worrying that AI would take our jobs.

We didn’t realise the bigger change would be that the jobs themselves would change shape underneath us, slowly enough that most people didn’t notice until it had already happened.

The analysts became interpreters. The administrators became orchestrators. The strategists became people who had to make decisions with machines instead of just handing decisions off to spreadsheets and hoping for the best.

And entirely new jobs appeared, because the world itself had changed underneath the old job titles.

Carbon brokers. Climate migration advisors. Futures practitioners - people whose entire job is helping others imagine a future they can actually picture themselves living in, not just surviving.

The office didn’t disappear because humans stopped working.

It disappeared because work stopped being a place.

And perhaps that’s the part I find hardest to explain to people who are twenty now, who’ve never known anything else.

The future of work was never really about AI.

It was about everything else that happened at the same time. A hotter planet. Scarcer resources. New rules nobody quite agreed on. New inequalities layered on top of old ones. New technologies that outpaced our ability to decide what they were for. New expectations about what a career, a life, a Tuesday afternoon, should even look like.

And underneath all of it, the same old human questions, stubbornly unchanged.

What do I owe other people?

What is enough?

Where do I belong?

What kind of life do I actually want, once you strip away what I was told to want?

And what kind of future am I willing to help create, even in small, uncertain, imperfect ways?

My daughter will probably never understand why I used to spend two hours commuting just to sit at a desk in a building I could’ve worked from anywhere. I hope she never has to understand it - I hope it stays as strange to her as it deserves to be.

But I also hope that when she’s my age, she looks back at the world we built, however clumsily, and asks a different question.

“Why did you ever think that was the only possible future?”

So, what was the point of imagining all of this?

This story isn’t a prediction.

It is a provocation.

I deliberately created this scenario in collaboration with AI, because I wanted to see what futures become possible when we ask different questions.

I gave it signals, assumptions and tensions. I challenged its ideas. I pushed the scenario further. And then I did something that I think will become increasingly important:

Argued with it.

AI can help us explore possibilities at a speed and scale that would have been difficult to achieve alone. It can connect signals, surface patterns and help us imagine worlds that sit beyond our immediate experience.

But it doesn’t decide which future is desirable.

What is your desirable future?

And once you can imagine it, what choices do you need to make today to help bring it closer?

Subscribe now

Share

Maybe it was the heat. We had another record-breaking day in 2026, with temperatures reaching levels that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Maybe it was the eclipse. Or maybe it was the combination of both: experiencing an extraordinary natural event at a time when we are increasingly aware of how much our planet and our societies are changing.

Whatever it was, this week made me pause.

Subscribe now

Looking at the sky

I couldn’t find eclipse glasses anywhere. I checked multiple optometrists and, eventually, gave up.

We took cardboard and a colander with us. Thankfully, we were able to borrow some proper glasses and experience the spectacular show, which was a reminder of how small we are, and how beautiful the universe we are part of is.

We joined a group of people in a park close by to experience the eclipse together.

It was my husband’s first time seeing one. For me, it was my first time experiencing one as an adult.

The last time I saw an eclipse, I was three years old.

1991

I remember living in Ensenada, Mexico, when the eclipse happened in 1991.

My only real memory is my mum telling my sister and me not to look at the sky because we could go blind.

A bit harsh, if you ask me. But my mum was doing her job: protecting us.

I also remember my dad preparing a couple of shoe boxes that we used to experience the eclipse safely.

And I remember seeing many families doing the same thing. Everyone was outside, looking up, experiencing something together.

More than 30 years later

A lot has happened since then.

I grew up, I got married, I became an adult with responsibilities, I experienced corporate life, I’ve lived outside Mexico for the last 15 years, etc.

My perspective of the world didn’t just change. It evolved through the people, communities and places I’ve encountered along the way.

And the world changed too: Geopolitics, technology, a pandemic, the rise of social media and the undeniable impact of climate change.

We have become much more aware of how complex the world is and, in many ways, how difficult it is to imagine what comes next.

But something happened during those 30 minutes

For years, I’ve been concerned about our lack of social connection and the hate that spreads through social media.

About the growing disillusionment with the possibility of a better world.

But during the eclipse, I saw something that made me think differently. At the peak of the eclipse, just for a moment, the world changed.

The places experiencing it paused and people looked up. Communities came together.

For about 30 minutes, people of different generations gathered to experience something bigger than themselves…

And they were amazed. No algorithm was telling us what to think.

No one was trying to convince us of anything. We were simply experiencing something together.

And for a moment, the world felt a little different.

When was the last time?

It made me wonder:

When was the last time you felt amazed?

And when was the last time you truly felt hopeful about the future?

We spend so much time thinking about everything that is going wrong.

And there is no shortage of things to worry about. Especially when so much of the future feels uncertain.

But what if, sometimes, we allowed ourselves to stop?

To be amazed by what we still have. To experience something bigger than ourselves.

Maybe hope is not passive

What if hope isn’t about pretending that everything is going to be fine?

What if hope is something we need to practice?

Maybe we need to create more moments that remind us why we should care about the future in the first place.

Perhaps it’s also about making sure we don’t lose our ability to imagine something worth becoming.

Share

I’ve always asked myself that question because, for a long time, I felt that many things took me longer than I wanted.

Networking, speaking up in meetings, presenting in front of others, writing confidently over email…

Or being more assertive when communicating my ideas so I could increase my influence in the workplace…

Looking back, I don’t think I lacked the ability. I simply felt like I was arriving later than everyone else.

It took me a long time to realise why I struggled during the early years of my career.

I was clearly capable, but I hadn’t been exposed to certain experiences.

I wish I had played more team sports growing up. I wish I had read more books that challenged my thinking. I even wish I had listened more carefully to my primary school teacher, who constantly encouraged us to read the newspaper. At the time, I didn’t understand why it mattered.

Now I do.

Those experiences weren’t about becoming better at sport or knowing more about current affairs. They were about learning to think critically, communicate with others, and become comfortable with different perspectives.

I think I missed one of the most important pieces of the puzzle: understanding why these things mattered.

When people told me to network, speak up or read more, they often felt like empty recommendations.

Do this. Do that.

But no one explained how those habits would shape the professional I would eventually become.

I became even more aware of this during university.

Some of my classmates had grown up in business families or had access to opportunities that encouraged a more holistic education - one that went beyond memorisation. They seemed more comfortable expressing their opinions, asking questions and navigating uncertainty.

At the time, I thought they were simply more confident.

Now I think they had simply been exposed to those situations much earlier than I had.

When I was given the opportunity to work in financial services and eventually become a people leader, I remember feeling incredibly overwhelmed.

The first months were confusing and, if I’m honest, quite shocking.

I think it was because almost nothing I had learned in school felt directly applicable to the workplace.

Success was measured differently. It wasn’t about having the right answer.

It was about influencing people, communicating clearly, building relationships and making decisions with incomplete information.

That took some time to adjust to.

Every becoming starts with an act of imagination.

Thankfully, that feeling didn’t last forever.

As I gained more experience, I realised I was perfectly capable of doing the job.

I could solve problems and challenge the status quo. I could develop my own leadership style.

What had taken me longer wasn’t my ability.

It was exposure.

Sometimes I wonder where I would be today if I had experienced some of those situations earlier.

Would I have recognised my strengths sooner?

Would I have developed stronger self-awareness earlier in my career?

Would I have built meaningful relationships more confidently?

I don’t ask myself those questions with regret.

I ask them because they make me wonder what is possible for the next generation.

When I look at what is happening today, these reflections feel even more relevant.

Entry-level jobs are changing and people are questioning what the value of higher education is.

AI can answer almost any factual question within seconds, and increasingly our role is no longer to memorise information but to verify it, interpret it and apply it.

Recent scandals around university admissions in countries like India and Mexico have also made many people question what we actually value in education.

If information is becoming increasingly accessible, what should education prepare us for?

One thought keeps coming back to me.

What if young people could experience work before they entered the workplace?

We often hear stories about children who helped in a family business and developed confidence at an early age.

I don’t think that’s because they were naturally more talented, but they experienced responsibility, accountability and negotiation in real life examples.

In many ways, they were already practising the kinds of human skills that work requires.

That makes me wonder...

What if we could create those kinds of experiences intentionally?

Not by asking young people to imagine the future. But by allowing them to experience it.

To step into different roles and work on problems that don’t yet have clear answers.

To collaborate with people from different countries and perspectives.

To collectively imagine how our communities, industries and careers might evolve over the next ten or fifteen years.

This could allow us being more prepared for the future.

That’s the experience I’ve been quietly designing over the last few months.

One that helps young adults navigate a different reality by placing them in different futures.

A space to explore new business ideas. To learn emerging skills and connect with people on the other side of the world.

To discover careers that are only just beginning to emerge in areas like sustainability, cybersecurity and AI.

Most importantly, a space where they can discover more about themselves.

Because if my own journey has taught me anything, it’s this:

Potential is rarely the problem. All we need is the right environment to discover what we’re capable of becoming.

Share

Looking back, I was doing something very different.

I was collecting clues.

Subscribe now

Every post became a small experiment. Which ideas sparked conversation? Which topics kept resurfacing? What were people excited about, worried about, or quietly trying to make sense of?

People often imagine futurists spending their days building scenarios or predicting what the world will look like in 2035.

The reality is much simpler. Futurists pay attention.

They notice patterns before they become obvious.

And over the past year, I’ve realised that some of the strongest signals aren’t found in reports or trend forecasts. They’re found in conversations.

And perhaps even more importantly, in the questions they keep asking.

Looking back at everything I’ve written and discussed with this community, six signals kept appearing.

None of them, on their own, predicts the future.

But together, they begin to tell a story.

I was trying to photograph Manchester's architecture. But these flowers stole the scene.
That's the thing about paying attention: the strongest signals are often hiding in plain sight.

Signal 1: Education is being redesigned around skills, not degrees.

One of the conversations that generated the most discussion started with a simple question:

What do universities need to remain relevant?

Across Latin America - and increasingly around the world - traditional education is struggling to keep pace with the speed of technological change.

Students aren’t only looking for knowledge anymore. They’re looking for confidence, experience & community.

The conversation is slowly shifting from “What did you study?” to “What can you actually do?”

That same shift is starting to reshape recruitment.

More organisations are embracing skills-based hiring, placing greater value on demonstrated capabilities than on job titles or even degrees.

Portfolios, projects and practical experience are becoming just as important as a CV.

Learning is becoming more visible, continuous and practical.

Signal 2: AI is becoming a learning companion.

One of the AI tools that genuinely excited me this year was Yamala, the experimental platform created by Sal Khan and the team behind Khan Academy.

Instead of replacing learning, AI becomes a coach.

A thinking partner, that helps you reason through problems instead of simply giving you the answer.

We’re moving from using AI to find answers to using AI to ask better questions.

Perhaps the future of education will belong to those who help people think.

Signal 3: Mental health is becoming a leadership issue.

One book stayed with me long after I finished reading it. The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt.

Although it’s often described as a book about Gen Z, I think it’s really a book about all of us. It explores what happened when childhood shifted from playgrounds to smartphones in little more than a decade.

The consequences are difficult to ignore: rising anxiety. shorter attention spans, a growing hunger for genuine human connection.

It reminded me that mental health is also shaped by the environments we create. Psychological safety isn’t a buzzword, it means creating spaces where people can ask questions, make mistakes, disagree respectfully and continue learning without fear.

If lifelong learning is the skill of the future, psychological safety may be the condition that makes it possible.

Signal 4: Gen Z isn’t looking for perks.

One conversation that resonated deeply came from research exploring what younger generations actually want from work.

The priorities sounded remarkably human.

• Growth.

• Respect.

• Honest leadership.

• Community.

• Psychological safety.

• Opportunities to keep learning.

For me, this has been a reminded of what work should have been all along.

Signal 5: Voice is becoming the new interface.

For years, we adapted ourselves to technology.

We learned to type, to click, to search. Now, voice assistants are becoming more natural.

We’re entering a world where speaking may become more common than typing and ideas can travel faster than ever before.

Ironically, that makes communication an even more valuable skill.

Signal 6: AI agents are beginning to work together.

Perhaps the signal that fascinates me the most is one that still feels experimental.

AI agents are no longer working in isolation. They’re beginning to collaborate with one another.

Today, it looks like an interesting demo. Tomorrow, it could reshape how organisations operate.

The future may not belong to people who compete with AI. It may belong to people who know how to orchestrate it.

The signal beneath all the signals

When I step back from all these conversations, I notice something deeper.

People are often trying to solve the same challenge.

What should I learn next?

How do I stay relevant?

How do I adapt without losing myself?

Can I turn what I’m learning into something meaningful?

Those questions have appeared again and again, regardless of age, industry or geography. To me, that’s the strongest signal of all.

Not that technology is changing. We already know that.

The real signal is that people are actively searching for new ways to grow, contribute and navigate uncertainty.

Why signal tracking matters

Looking back, I don’t think I’ve spent the past year creating content.

I’ve been learning in public. Every conversation, every comment and every question has helped me notice patterns I might have missed on my own.

That’s why this community has become my best source of foresight.

Not because anyone can predict what’s coming. But because, together, we’re paying attention.

The future rarely announces itself. It leaves clues.

The question isn’t whether those clues exist. It’s whether we’re paying attention.

Share

A few weeks ago, I attended one of the events during London Climate Action Week.

The topic was young leadership in conservation.

On the surface, it might sound like a conversation relevant only to environmental professionals. But as I listened to researchers, funders, and conservation leaders discuss the challenges facing the sector, I found myself thinking:

This isn’t just a conservation story.

It’s a story about the future of work. It’s a story about uncertainty.

And it’s a story that increasingly applies to all of us.

Passion Is No Longer Enough

One theme came up repeatedly throughout the discussion.

Young people entering conservation are deeply passionate about protecting nature. But passion alone does not build a sustainable career.

To create lasting impact, they need access to resources, networks, mentorship, and funding.

They need clarity on how to navigate a profession that often feels uncertain.

They need to understand how to access capital, communicate their ideas, build partnerships, and turn good intentions into scalable solutions.

In other words, they need resilience. Not just personal resilience, but professional resilience.

The ability to adapt, learn, collaborate, and continue moving forward when the path ahead is unclear.

A Challenge Far Bigger Than Conservation

What struck me most was how familiar these challenges sounded.

Across industries, many of the assumptions that shaped previous generations are being challenged.

For decades, many careers followed relatively predictable paths. That script was never perfect, but it provided a sense of certainty.

Today, that certainty feels harder to find.

Climate change is reshaping industries, geopolitical tensions are creating instability, artificial intelligence is changing the nature of work, economic pressures are making traditional career paths less predictable.

Many sectors that experienced years of stability are now navigating profound uncertainty.

Conservation is simply one example of a much larger shift.

The Skills That Matter Now

The conservation leaders I heard from spoke about the need for local knowledge, community-led solutions, and stronger connections between those doing the work and those funding it.

Evidence matters. Expertise matters.

But solutions become more effective when they are rooted in local realities.

The same principle applies across industries.

The professionals who thrive in the coming decades may not be those with the most technical expertise alone.

They may be those who can:

• Learn continuously.

• Tell compelling stories.

• Build trust across different groups.

• Co-create solutions with others.

• Navigate ambiguity without losing direction.

• Translate ideas into action.

These are not “soft skills.” They are becoming survival skills.

The Responsibility Doesn’t Sit With Young People Alone

But there is another side to this conversation.

Too often, we ask individuals to become more resilient without questioning the systems around them.

During the event, several speakers highlighted the challenges organisations face when funding is tied only to short-term projects.

If we want organisations to build resilience, innovate, and scale their impact, they need support that goes beyond individual initiatives.

We cannot simply tell young professionals to adapt to uncertainty while maintaining systems that make meaningful careers harder to build.

Those in positions of power (funders, employers, policymakers, and leaders) have an important role to play.

Allowing talent to pursue paths aligned with both their values and society’s needs.

Because resilience should not be an individual burden alone.

It should be designed into the systems we create.

A Day in the Life Of...

As I reflected on these conversations, I found myself thinking about something completely different.

School career days.

Perhaps you remember them too: A doctor visits the classroom, an engineer explains their work or a business owner shares their story.

For a brief moment, we got a glimpse into what adulthood might look like.

A “day in the life of” someone who had already figured it out.

Maybe it inspired us. Maybe it simply sparked curiosity.

But there was something powerful about those moments.

At eight or ten years old, we could imagine ourselves becoming those people.

There was uncertainty, of course. But there was also possibility.

The Stories We Tell About Work Matter

I sometimes wonder what those career days would sound like today.

Especially in sectors like conservation. Would the message inspire the next generation?

Or would it focus on the challenges? The funding gaps, the uncertainty, the difficult career prospects, the salaries that struggle to keep pace with the cost of living…

These realities matter and should not be ignored. But if they become the only story we tell, we risk losing something important.

We risk losing the spark. The sense that meaningful work can still exist.

The next generation needs honesty. But they also need hope, not false optimism.

A realistic vision of careers that contribute to society, strengthen communities, and help solve the challenges of our time.

A Different Question

Perhaps the problem is not that we ask children what they want to be when they grow up. Perhaps the problem is that we stop there.

Imagine being ten years old again.

Instead of being asked:

“What do you want to be?”

You are asked:

“What values do you want to live by?”

“What kind of contribution do you want to make?”

“What problems would you like to help solve?”

The answers might look very different. They would be less tied to a specific job title and more connected to who we are and what we care about.

Countless paths that do not fit neatly into the categories we inherited from previous generations.

In a future defined by uncertainty, perhaps the most resilient thing we can build is not a career plan. It’s a strong sense of purpose.

If you were asked at age 10 what values you wanted to live by - instead of what job you wanted - what would your answer have been?

Share

Why People Are Thinking More About the Future

A few days ago, I invited readers of The Becoming Project to imagine their neighbourhood twenty years from now.

Would there be more green spaces? More autonomous vehicles? Community gardens? Shared housing? Fewer cars? Different ways of working and learning?

What surprised me was how engaged people were with the exercise.

People want to talk about the future.

Not because they are trying to predict it, but because they are trying to make sense of a world that feels increasingly uncertain.

Will AI change my career?

What skills should I be learning?

What jobs will exist in ten years?

How do I prepare for a future that seems to change every week?

These are some of the most common questions I hear in conversations about the future of work.

The challenge is that nobody knows exactly what comes next.

Yet while we cannot predict the future, we can learn to recognise the early signs of change that are already shaping it.

In a world of accelerating technological, social, environmental, and economic shifts, reading signals may be one of the most important skills we can develop.

What Is a Future Signal?

A future signal is an early indication that change is happening.

It might be a new technology, a changing consumer behaviour, an unexpected business model, a policy experiment, a demographic shift, or even a seemingly small story hidden in the news.

On their own, signals can appear insignificant.

But when we pay attention to them over time, they can reveal patterns that help us understand where the world may be heading.

Think of them as clues.

Signals are not predictions. They do not tell us what the future will be.

Instead, they help us explore what the future could become.

The first smartphones were signals.

Remote work was a signal long before it became mainstream.

Generative AI was a signal before millions of people began using it every day.

The challenge is that signals are often easiest to recognise in hindsight.

Why Signal Reading Matters for the Future of Work

For most of human history, change happened slowly enough that people could build a career around a relatively stable set of assumptions.

Today, those assumptions are being challenged more frequently than ever.

Technological breakthroughs, climate pressures, demographic shifts, geopolitical changes, and evolving expectations around work are transforming industries at a pace many organisations struggle to keep up with.

As a result, preparing for the future is becoming less about having the right answer and more about asking the right questions.

This is where signal reading becomes valuable.

It helps us move from reacting to change to anticipating it.

Instead of asking:

“What job should I prepare for?”

We can begin asking:

“What changes are already happening that might create new opportunities?”

Instead of asking:

“What skill is most important?”

We can ask:

“What capabilities will remain valuable across multiple possible futures?”

The people who navigate uncertainty most effectively are often not those with the best predictions.

They are the ones who develop the habit of noticing change before it becomes obvious.

Here are three trends worth monitoring.

#1: AI Is Reshaping Entry-Level Work

One of the clearest developments today is the rapid adoption of generative AI.

Much of the public conversation focuses on whether AI will replace jobs.

A more useful question may be:

How will AI change the way people enter the workforce?

For decades, many careers began with repetitive tasks.

Junior consultants built presentations. Analysts cleaned data. Graduate trainees conducted research. Marketing assistants drafted content.

These activities were not just work. They were learning opportunities.

Today, AI can perform many of these tasks in minutes.

That doesn’t necessarily mean entry-level jobs disappear.

But it does suggest they may evolve.

Future graduates may be expected to contribute judgment, creativity, communication skills, and problem-solving abilities earlier in their careers because the routine work that once occupied their first years is increasingly automated.

We may also see the emergence of new entry-level roles focused on AI collaboration, prompt design, AI governance, human oversight, and workflow orchestration.

The signal is not that humans are becoming less important.

The signal is that the value of uniquely human capabilities may be increasing.

#2: Experience Is Becoming More Valuable Than Credentials Alone

Another development worth paying attention to is the growing emphasis on skills-based hiring.

Increasingly, employers want evidence of what people can do, not just where they studied.

Portfolios. Projects. Internships. Apprenticeships. Volunteer work. Simulations.

Practical experience is becoming a stronger indicator of potential than credentials alone.

This shift is particularly important for younger generations entering the workforce.

For years, the formula seemed straightforward: study hard, earn a degree, and opportunities would follow.

Today, employers are often looking for proof that candidates can solve problems, collaborate with others, communicate effectively, and adapt to new challenges.

As a result, learning can no longer stop at graduation.

The future belongs to those who can continuously learn, experiment, and demonstrate new capabilities throughout their careers.

#3: Climate Adaptation Is Creating Entirely New Careers

Climate change is often discussed as an environmental issue.

But it is also a workforce issue.

Around the world, cities, businesses, and governments are preparing for extreme heat, biodiversity loss, flooding, resource scarcity, and changing weather patterns.

As a result, new roles are emerging in areas such as:

• Climate risk analysis

• Urban resilience

• Sustainable supply chains

• Biodiversity management

• Circular economy design

Many of these jobs barely existed a decade ago.

Others are being transformed by the need to build more resilient communities, organisations, and infrastructure.

For students and professionals entering the workforce today, understanding sustainability may become as important as understanding technology.

The green transition will not only create new jobs. It will reshape existing ones.

The Future Is Already Here

One of my favourite ideas from futurist William Gibson is:

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Future signals are everywhere:

In the tools people are experimenting with. In the skills companies are hiring for.

In demographic shifts. In policy decisions. In changing behaviours. In the conversations happening around us.

The goal is not to predict exactly what comes next.

The goal is to become better at noticing.

Because in a world where uncertainty has become the norm, the ability to spot signals, connect patterns, and imagine possibilities may be one of the most valuable skills we can develop.

The future rarely arrives all at once.

It leaves clues first.

The question is whether we are paying attention.

As part of The Becoming Project, I’ll be sharing future signals, emerging trends, and early indicators of change that could shape the future of work, learning, and society.

Not to predict the future, but to help us become better prepared for it.

What signals are you noticing?

I’d love to hear what changes, trends, or developments you think will have the biggest impact on the future of work over the next decade.

Last week, the UK experienced one of its hottest June days on record.

As temperatures climbed, conversations quickly turned to a phrase we hear more and more often: the new normal.

But what does that actually mean?

The new normal suggests adaptation. It implies that change is no longer temporary, that we must learn to live with it. Yet adapting to something that is still unfolding, something unpredictable and constantly shifting, is far from straightforward.

How do we prepare for a future that has not yet arrived?

Subscribe now

One of the most powerful ways is through storytelling.

When we talk about the future, we often hear from scientists, technologists, economists, and CEOs. Their perspectives are essential. They help us understand trends, risks, and possibilities. But numbers and forecasts alone rarely help us feel the future.

Stories do.

Stories allow us to step into a possible tomorrow and experience it for a moment. They help us imagine how we might live, work, travel, connect with others, and respond to challenges. They transform abstract trends into something human and relatable.

The goal is not to predict what will happen.

The goal is to build our imagination so we can develop our own judgement about the opportunities, trade-offs, and choices ahead.

Science fiction has been doing this for decades. Not by telling us exactly what the future will look like, but by inviting us to explore what it could feel like.

So after experiencing one of the hottest June days on record, I found myself imagining a typical day in South West London twenty years from now.

A Letter From 2046

I invite you to read the following as a testimony from someone living in 2046. As you read, try to picture the scene.

South West London continues to offer the best of both worlds: close enough to Central London to feel connected, yet close enough to the English countryside to escape into nature within minutes.

However, things have changed since 2022, when we first moved to the area.

A typical workday looks very different now. Commuting still exists, but not in the way previous generations knew it. Trains are far less frequent than they once were, with passenger numbers never fully returning after the shift towards flexible and distributed work. Most journeys are booked in advance, and travel into the city has become something people do intentionally rather than automatically.

London remains a city in motion.

Cyclists continue to dominate the streets, healthier and more numerous than ever. But another group has emerged alongside them over the past two decades: water commuters.

What was once considered a leisure activity is now part of daily life.

The Thames has gradually become more than a landmark. It has become infrastructure.

Electric water taxis glide between neighbourhoods. Kayaks are parked outside homes in the same way bicycles once were. Floating walkways connect parts of the city, and new housing developments have been designed to live with water rather than fight against it.

The city’s response to climate change has not been perfect, but it has forced innovation in ways that few people anticipated.

The Return of Community

The biggest transformation, however, has happened much closer to home.

As people spend more time within their local communities, homes have become places of production as much as consumption. Rooftops generate energy. Gardens produce food. Repairing, growing, and making things have become everyday skills rather than niche hobbies.

DIY culture is no longer a weekend pastime; it is simply part of life.

My favourite day of the week is Sunday.

Every week, neighbours gather outside their homes to exchange what they have grown, made, or repaired. Tomatoes for strawberries. Herbs for honey. Homemade jam for freshly baked bread.

Children run between stalls while adults exchange gardening tips, recipes, and stories.

What started as a practical response to rising costs, climate uncertainty, and supply chain disruptions gradually evolved into something far more valuable.

Community.

People know their neighbours again. Skills are shared across generations.

The boundaries between producer and consumer have blurred.

And despite all the technological advances surrounding us, it is these small human interactions that people value most.

A reminder that moving forward doesn’t always mean doing more of the same.

As conditions change, we adapt.
As the world evolves, we learn.
As new challenges emerge, we find new ways forward.

That’s what becoming is all about.

An Invitation to Imagine

Perhaps none of this will happen exactly as imagined.

The future rarely follows the script we write for it.

But that is not the point.

The value of imagining possible futures is not prediction. It is preparation.

The more vividly we can imagine different possibilities, the better equipped we become to navigate uncertainty when it arrives. We become better at recognising change, spotting opportunities, and adapting when circumstances shift.

Stories help us rehearse for futures we have not yet experienced.

So here’s a question:

Can you imagine your neighbourhood twenty years from now? What habits have changed in 2046?

How have you adapted to a different climate, different technologies, or different ways of working?

Are you still living in the same place?

What does your community look like?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who have you become along the way?

Share The Becoming Project

Lately, it feels like every conversation about the future starts with the same questions.

Will AI take jobs?

Will remote work stay?

What skills should we learn?

How do we prepare for a world that seems to change every week?

I don’t have the answers. In fact, I don’t think anyone does.

Subscribe now

But when conversations about the future start feeling overwhelming, I often find myself looking backwards.

Because while we can’t predict the future, we can learn a lot from understanding how we got here.

History reminds us that what feels permanent is often temporary.

And what feels normal today was once almost impossible to imagine.

What feels normal wasn’t always normal

Take education.

Many of the systems we still use today were designed during the Industrial Revolution. Schools were created to prepare people for a world of factories: standardised schedules, age groups, fixed curricula, and clear hierarchies.

The world changed dramatically.

The system largely stayed the same.

Or take artificial intelligence.

The recent explosion of AI can make it feel like it appeared overnight.

Yet the term “Artificial Intelligence” was first coined in 1956. What we’re witnessing today is not the birth of AI, but the continuation of a journey that began decades ago.

Even the way we live has transformed.

For most of human history, daily movement was built into life. Walking long distances wasn’t exercise; it was simply how people got around.

Today many of us spend most of our day sitting and schedule movement into our calendars.

What feels natural to one generation can feel strange to another.

Change often happens slowly. Then suddenly.

Looking back, transformations often seem obvious.

Of course cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.

Of course people communicate instantly across continents.

Of course millions of people work remotely.

But for the people living through those transitions, none of it felt obvious.

History rarely announces itself while it’s happening.

Most change arrives quietly.

One small shift at a time.

Until one day we realise the world looks completely different.

A letter from 2021

Let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine you were born in the year 1800.

You live in a small town somewhere in Europe.

Your world is local.

News travels slowly.

Most journeys happen on foot, horseback, or carriage.

You have never seen a car.

You have never spoken to someone hundreds of miles away.

You have certainly never heard the words internet, smartphone, or artificial intelligence.

Then one day, a letter arrives.

It’s from someone living in 2021.

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you from the future.

Our world is connected by invisible networks. We carry devices in our pockets that allow us to speak instantly with people on the other side of the planet.

We can access vast libraries of knowledge in seconds.

Many of us travel through the sky in giant machines carrying hundreds of people at a time.

Doctors can see inside the human body without opening it.

Machines can perform calculations faster than any human who has ever lived.

And recently, a disease spread across the entire world.

To slow its spread, millions of people stayed inside their homes while scientists across different countries worked together to develop vaccines in a matter of months.

Children attended school through screens.

Office workers stopped commuting and worked from their kitchens and spare bedrooms.

Families celebrated birthdays through video calls.

Many people went months without physically seeing friends, colleagues, or loved ones.

At times, the streets of major cities were almost empty.

Yet much of society continued to function through technology.

People adapted.

They learned.

They changed.

Would you believe that letter? I probably wouldn’t.

Some parts would sound like fantasy. Others would seem completely impossible.

Yet every word would be true.

What if we’re living in one of those moments now?

This is what I keep reminding myself whenever discussions about the future become overwhelming.

The future rarely arrives all at once.

It emerges through countless small shifts that are difficult to notice when we are living through them.

The people of 1800 could not imagine our world. And perhaps we cannot imagine the world of 2050.

Maybe future generations will look back at our concerns about AI the same way we look back at concerns about electricity, automobiles, or the internet.

Not because the concerns weren’t real.

But because change created possibilities that people couldn’t yet see.

The Becoming Question

Whether you’re a university student wondering which career path to choose, a middle manager trying to understand AI, a healthcare worker navigating new technologies, a scientist exploring new discoveries, a conservationist protecting ecosystems, or someone simply trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world...

What if your job isn’t to predict the future?

What if it’s to become ready for it? To stay curious enough to keep learning.

Adaptable enough to evolve. And humble enough to recognise that today’s certainty may become tomorrow’s history.

Because understanding how we got here might be one of the best ways to prepare for where we’re going.

Imagine a letter arriving from your future self twenty years from now.

What part of your life today would seem impossible to them?

And what assumptions are you making about the future that might one day look as outdated as a horse and carriage?

Share

If you want to survive the AI era, we’re told, you need to learn new skills, master new tools, follow the right experts, and stay ahead of the curve.

And perhaps that’s true.

But somewhere along the way, navigating uncertainty has become exhausting.

Subscribe now

Every week brings another headline about layoffs. Another prediction about jobs disappearing. Another reminder that the world is changing faster than ever.

Recently, I spoke with a former colleague who admitted feeling anxious because there simply wasn’t enough time to keep up with all the new AI tools appearing every day.

I understood exactly what they meant.

But it also made me wonder:

What is the real source of that anxiety?

Anxiety Is Fear of a Future That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Anxiety is often described as fear about something that hasn’t happened.

Read that again.

Something that hasn’t happened.

The feeling is real. The physical reaction is real. But the event itself exists only in our imagination.

We fear a future scenario because we don’t know how we will respond when it arrives.

Will we stay calm?

Will we make the right decisions?

Will we lose control?

The uncertainty is not only about what might happen.

It is about not trusting ourselves to handle it.

When I look back at my own life, I realise many of my biggest moments of anxiety came before experiences I had never encountered before.

Moving from my home town to a new one, needing to say bye to my dearly friends and encounter closed communities.

Starting my first role in financial services.

Studying for a master’s degree in a foreign language.

Migrating to another country.

Renting a property abroad, for the first time.

The list goes on…

Perhaps yours sounds familiar too:

• Becoming a parent.

• Meeting your partner’s parents.

• Receiving a promotion.

• Starting a business.

• Moving abroad.

Most of us can think of situations that once felt overwhelming and uncertain.

Yet when we finally lived through them, they were often very different from what we had imagined.

Sometimes the feared scenario never happened.

Sometimes it happened, but we were far more capable than we expected.

The Hidden Advantage of Having a Reference Point

When I entered corporate life, I had no real exposure to it.

Like many people, my experience had been almost entirely academic.

Nobody had taught me how to navigate ambiguity.

How to ask difficult questions.

How to challenge authority respectfully.

How to influence decisions.

How to build networks.

Meanwhile, some colleagues appeared completely comfortable.

Over time, I realised that confidence often comes from exposure.

Perhaps their parents worked in similar environments.

Perhaps they grew up debating ideas around the dinner table.

Perhaps they were encouraged to take risks as children.

Perhaps they simply had examples around them that showed them what was possible.

When we have reference points, uncertainty feels smaller.

When we don’t, uncertainty can feel enormous.

This is why some of the most profound anxiety often appears among people entering spaces where they have few role models:

• First-generation professionals.

• Working mothers.

• Migrants building lives in new countries.

• Entrepreneurs creating businesses from scratch.

They are not only facing challenges. They are facing challenges without a map.

Today’s Uncertainty Is Different

Career anxiety is not new.

For decades, people have worried about job security, economic change, access to education, and social mobility.

But today’s uncertainty feels different.

Not because uncertainty itself is new.

Because uncertainty is now happening at scale.

Young people are expected to learn networking skills, communication skills, digital skills, and now AI literacy.

Entire industries are being reshaped. Geopolitical tensions create ripple effects across economies. New jobs are emerging that didn’t exist a few years ago.

And perhaps most importantly, we are exposed to all of it, all the time.

Hyperconnectivity means we are constantly consuming information about futures we cannot control.

Thousands of possibilities.

Thousands of opinions.

Thousands of reasons to feel behind.

The psychological impact is significant.

We are being asked to prepare for roles, industries, and futures that have not fully formed yet.

How do you prepare for something nobody has experienced before?

The Practice That Changed My Relationship With Uncertainty

This is where futures thinking transformed my life.

Many people think futures thinking is about predicting what will happen.

In reality, it is often about becoming more comfortable with uncertainty.

Take something deeply personal: my parents ageing.

I have never experienced having elderly parents who need significant care.

Yet I know it is a future possibility.

Instead of avoiding the thought, I can choose to explore it.

• I can imagine myself ten or twenty years from now.

• I can imagine my parents being older.

• I can imagine mobility becoming more limited.

• I can imagine care becoming necessary.

• I can imagine the fact that I live abroad adding complexity.

Once I create that future scenario, I can begin asking questions.

• What type of accommodation might they need?

• What support systems would be required?

• What resources might be necessary?

• What would matter most to them?

  And then something interesting happens. The future becomes less abstract.

  I can translate future possibilities into actions today.

• Do I need better financial planning?

• Should I understand care options earlier?

• Is their current living arrangement suitable?

• What conversations should we be having now?

The uncertainty doesn’t disappear.

But my relationship with it changes.

What If We Applied This To Our Careers?

What if we approached career uncertainty the same way?

Instead of asking:

“What job will AI eliminate?”

Perhaps we ask:

“What future versions of myself might emerge?”

Instead of trying to predict the future perfectly, perhaps we imagine multiple possibilities.

What if my current role changes significantly?

What if I need to collaborate with AI every day?

What if I decide to switch industries?

What if I choose a slower, more meaningful path?

What capabilities would help me across all those futures?

What relationships would matter?

What values would remain constant?

What strengths do I already possess?

The goal is not certainty.

The goal is building confidence that whatever future arrives, we will be able to navigate it.

Because perhaps the greatest source of anxiety is not uncertainty itself.

It is the belief that we won’t know what to do when uncertainty arrives.

And perhaps the greatest gift we can give ourselves is evidence that we have already done it many times before.

After all, every meaningful chapter of our lives once began as a future we had never experienced.

Yet somehow, we became the person capable of living it.

Share

We seek plans, forecasts, five-year goals, and increasingly, algorithms that can tell us what comes next. We celebrate certainty because it feels safe. Predictable. Controllable.

Yet when I look back at the moments that shaped my life most profoundly, very few began with certainty.

They began with questions.

A career change without a clear destination. A move to a new country. A decision that made sense in my heart long before it made sense on paper.

The truth is that becoming rarely happens inside certainty. It happens when we step into the unknown and discover who we are capable of being.

Subscribe now

The Myth of the Perfect Plan

We often tell ourselves that successful people knew exactly where they were going.

The reality is messier.

When J.K. Rowling began writing Harry Potter, she was a single mother living on limited means, carrying a story that many publishers rejected before one finally took a chance on it.

When Steve Jobs left college, he had no roadmap for creating one of the world’s most influential companies. His famous calligraphy class - a decision that seemed impractical at the time -later influenced the typography of the Macintosh.

When Sara Blakely started Spanx, she wasn’t following a carefully designed entrepreneurial blueprint. She was selling fax machines door to door and experimenting with an idea she believed in.

What these stories have in common is not certainty.

It is movement.

Each of these people took a step before they had guarantees.

The Cost of Waiting

Many of us postpone action until uncertainty disappears.

We wait until we feel ready.

Until we have more information.

Until the risk feels smaller.

But uncertainty is not a temporary condition that eventually disappears from life. It is a permanent feature of it.

The future of work is uncertain.

Technology is evolving rapidly.

Industries are transforming.

Career paths are becoming less linear than ever before.

If we wait for certainty before making meaningful decisions, we may spend our lives waiting.

The people who create change are not those who eliminate uncertainty. They are those who learn how to move alongside it.

Uncertainty as a Teacher

Looking back, some of the most valuable lessons in my own life emerged during periods when I had the fewest answers.

Uncertainty has a way of revealing what matters.

When the path ahead is unclear, external expectations lose some of their power. We are forced to listen more carefully to our own values, curiosity, and intuition.

We discover what we truly want, not what we were told we should want.

We learn resilience.

We learn adaptability.

We learn that we are capable of navigating more than we imagined.

These lessons are difficult to access when everything is predictable.

Becoming in an Age of AI

As artificial intelligence reshapes the way we work, many people are understandably asking what comes next.

Which jobs will change?

Which skills will matter?

What should we prepare for?

These are important questions. But perhaps there is another one worth asking:

How do we become the kind of people who can thrive amid uncertainty?

The future may not reward those who can predict every change.

It may reward those who can learn, adapt, stay curious, and reinvent themselves when circumstances demand it.

In other words, the future may belong not to those who seek certainty, but to those who develop the capacity for becoming.

An Invitation

If you find yourself standing at a crossroads today (professionally or personally) consider this:

Perhaps uncertainty is not evidence that you are lost.

Perhaps it is evidence that you are growing.

The most meaningful chapters of our lives often begin before we know how they will end.

And maybe that is the point.

Because becoming is not about arriving at a final version of ourselves.

It is about having the courage to take the next step, even when the path ahead is not fully visible.

The future remains uncertain.

But then again, so did every remarkable story before it was written.

Share

This reflection is being published on World Environment Day, which also happens to be my birthday.

A special birthday, one that made me look back at my decision to step away from the traditional path and pursue a more intentional career.

Last year, my birthday felt full of uncertainty. Today, I still navigate uncertainty - as most of us do - but the last 12 months have given me perspective, knowledge, meaningful relationships, and most importantly, self-awareness.

Subscribe now

What a Garden Can Teach Us

In the UK, we experienced the hottest May since 2004, a reminder of the urgency of climate action for both ourselves and future generations.

One small contribution we follow is No Mow May, an initiative designed to promote biodiversity and pollination. Thousands of gardens are left untouched for a month and interestingly, they often become more alive than at any other point in the year.

Our garden suddenly fills with curious foxes. Wildflowers begin to appear. Bees return. Birds visit more often. Even our neighbours’ cats seem more interested in stopping by.

Nature, once again, offers us a lesson.

We often care for our gardens in ways that are aesthetically correct: perfectly trimmed grass, carefully selected plants, pesticides when needed, ornaments placed with intention.

Yet when we allow nature to regenerate on its own, something remarkable happens.

The garden comes alive.

Its beauty becomes messy, authentic, and unique and in turn, it attracts even more life and beauty around it.

I think reinvention works the same way.

A quiet visitor stopping by during No Mow May

The Pause I Didn’t Know I Needed

I write this during a period in which my body has asked me to pause.

Last year was intense, exciting, and transformative. But eventually, my body and mind needed real rest, time to absorb everything I had experienced, process the knowledge I had acquired, and identify what truly adds value to my life versus what simply drains my energy.

As expected, my mind still tries hard to remain in “drive mode.” Sometimes I even feel guilty when I slow down.

But lately, I’ve been having the best sleep I’ve had in a long time. My trainer keeps me accountable for morning walks. I take my time while eating instead of rushing through every moment.

And instead of pretending I suddenly feel endlessly energised, I’ll be honest:

I feel tired.

But my body is saying thank you.
Thank you for finally giving it the chance to regenerate.

Reinvention Starts With Self-Awareness

Reinvention often starts with a pause.

Especially in an age of hyperconnectivity, where success has been reduced to a rigid mould to follow. And the moment our lives stop matching the script, anxiety quietly begins to creep in.

Before obsessing over the next technology, the latest AI model, or another professional certification, maybe we should first reconnect with who we really are.

While mentoring young professionals, I’ve noticed this repeatedly:

No one becomes successful by trying to become someone else.

The people who thrive are coachable without losing their essence. They learn to remove the noise of comparison. They become intentional about what benefits them and brave enough to let go of what doesn’t.

That may actually be the hardest challenge of modern life.

We constantly receive reminders (solicited or unsolicited) about what we should do, what we should achieve by a certain age, and how we are supposed to behave.

The Problem With Hyperproductivity

The system feels broken.

People feel trapped maintaining a version of themselves designed to meet external expectations, unable to give themselves the time and space to regenerate.

We assume the pause will happen “someday.”
But don’t wait until life forces it upon you.

You can still value your past experiences.
You can still remain connected to the people around you.
But choosing yourself first can provide a level of clarity that no external advice ever will.

And perhaps this matters now more than ever.

With rapid technological change, shifting work environments, and the rise of solopreneurship, it has never been easier to create a website, build an app, or launch a business.

The difficult part is no longer how to build.

The difficult part is understanding:

• What to build.

• Who to build it for.

• And who you want to build it with.

That clarity can only come from knowing yourself and surrounding yourself with people aligned with your values and mission.

Advice We Rarely Hear

This is why I sometimes feel frustrated by the advice constantly given to young people today:

• Learn how to prompt.

• Learn how to build an AI agent.

• Build a six-figure business in a month.

All of this without context.
Without judgement.
Without reflection.
Without creating safe spaces for people to pause and understand themselves or one another.

Technology matters. Adaptability matters. Ambition matters.

But none of those things can replace self-awareness.

A Final Reflection

So I’ll leave you with this:

Have you ever reached a point where your body was desperately asking you to slow down?

And what prevents us from being more honest with ourselves and appreciating our own unique beauty?

Leave a comment

A couple of years ago, I read The Learning Game by Ana Lorena Fábrega during a period where I kept asking myself the same question:

If traditional education is no longer preparing people for the modern world… what is the alternative?

Not just academically.
But humanly.

Subscribe now

At the time, I was thinking a lot about teams, growth, and potential. I kept noticing situations where someone incredibly capable would remain behind another person who, on paper, did not necessarily seem more intelligent or technically stronger.

Over time, the difference became clearer.

The people progressing faster often had something else: Human skills.

And I started wondering where those skills are actually developed.

When Did We Lose Our Confidence?

One scene from the Barbie movie (2023) stayed with me long after watching it: The moment when Barbie goes out to the real world.

There is this tension around identity, expectations, and trying to fit into versions of ourselves created by society.

And it made me think about childhood.

When we are children, we are naturally curious.

We ask endless questions.
We try things without embarrassment.
We fail publicly and try again minutes later.

For those who are parents, you probably know this feeling well.

The constant “why?” questions from children can feel exhausting, but they also make you wonder:

When did we, as adults, stop being that curious?

At what point did confidence become self-consciousness?

Because somewhere along the way, many of us learn that fitting in is safer than exploring freely.

We are taught there is:

• a correct answer

• a correct path

• a correct timeline

• a correct definition of success

And for many people, that process slowly disconnects them from their natural abilities.

Some children are too energetic.
Others too creative.
Others ask too many questions.
Others struggle inside rigid systems.

Instead of adapting systems around different ways of learning, we often expect individuals to adapt themselves to the system.

And many grow up feeling like they simply “do not fit.”

The “Game of School”

One of the core ideas in The Learning Game is what Fábrega calls “the game of school”. The behaviours children learn to succeed academically: following instructions, behaving well, memorising information, and getting good grades.

But performing well in school is not always the same thing as learning deeply.

And it is definitely not the same thing as learning how to navigate life.

Traditional education often rewards predictability over adaptability.

We learn to avoid mistakes.
We learn to seek the correct answer quickly.
We learn to optimise for validation.

But real life rarely works that way.

Lion cubs are born curious.
They learn through play, exploration, observation, and instinct.

Somewhere along the way, many children are taught that the goal is no longer to question but to conform.
What if education focused less on fitting in… and more on helping children stay wild enough to wonder?

Why Video Games Feel More Engaging Than Real Life

One of the most interesting sections in the book was the discussion around video games and learning.

Children rarely get frustrated by losing in video games the same way adults fear failure in real life.

They lose.
Then they try again.
Adjust strategy.
Improve timing.
Collaborate with others.
And slowly work their way into the next level.

Without realising it, they are learning:

• adaptation

• strategy

• persistence

• problem solving

• emotional regulation

Of course, conversations around video games are controversial, especially around addiction and screen exposure.

Those concerns are valid.

But I also think there is a deeper question underneath it:

Why do many people feel more engaged solving problems in a game than during parts of their actual jobs?

Maybe because games create something many systems fail to create:

• autonomy

• progress

• feedback

• curiosity

• freedom to fail safely

In games, failure is part of the process.

In many educational or professional environments, failure feels like identity damage.

And that changes everything.

Learning by Doing

One section of the book that deeply resonated with me was the emphasis on play and self-directed learning.

Because children naturally learn through experimentation.

They try.
They fail.
They adapt.
They collaborate.
They improvise.

Somewhere along the way, learning becomes performance.

And maybe that is part of the problem.

After reading the book, I became fascinated by schools experimenting with different educational models.

For example, Astra Nova School focuses heavily on problem solving, creativity, collaboration, and real-world challenges rather than rigid standardisation.

Similarly, Montessori models encourage independence, curiosity, and exploration from an early age instead of forcing every child into the exact same structure.

These systems are not perfect, and they may not yet be scalable for everyone.

But they raise an important question:

What if education focused less on producing compliant students and more on developing adaptable human beings?

Failure as Part of Learning

Another idea from the book that stayed with me was the need to unlearn the fear of failure.

I think many adults quietly carry that fear into their careers.

Fear of changing direction.
Fear of not knowing enough.
Fear of starting again.
Fear of uncertainty.

But uncertainty is no longer the exception. It is the environment.

Maybe We Need a Different Definition of Education

Looking back, I think this book arrived at the right moment for me.

Not because it gave me answers, but because it helped me connect ideas I was already observing across education, leadership, and personal growth.

Maybe education is not only about transferring information.

Maybe it is about helping people become:

• adaptable

• emotionally intelligent

• resilient

• collaborative

• curious enough to keep learning

Because the future probably will not belong to the people who simply memorised the most answers.

It may belong to the people who never stopped learning after the answers changed.

And maybe the real question is not only:
“What should children learn?”

But also:

What parts of ourselves did we stop developing once we became adults?

Curiosity?
Creativity?
Confidence?
The courage to fail and try again?

I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts:

When do you think people start losing their natural curiosity and confidence?
And what kind of education do you think the future actually needs?

Subscribe now

Share The Becoming Project

The Promise We Were Sold

There’s a quiet crisis happening among Millennials and Gen Z.

Not because young people are incapable. Not because they are lazy, entitled, or unwilling to work hard. But because many followed the exact formula they were promised would create stability and still arrived at uncertainty.

Go to school. Get good grades. Go to university. Work hard. Build a successful career.

For decades, this path represented security and upward mobility. Today, for many young people, it feels increasingly disconnected from reality.

We entered adulthood during a period shaped by rising living costs, housing instability, burnout, layoffs, economic uncertainty, and now AI transforming industries faster than institutions can adapt. At the same time, graduates continue competing for entry-level jobs that somehow require years of prior experience, emotional intelligence, communication skills, adaptability, and commercial awareness (capabilities that many education systems barely teach).

And that’s the contradiction at the centre of this conversation.

The world changed, but education largely didn’t.

Educated for Predictability, Living in Uncertainty

Most traditional education systems were built for a completely different era - one that valued predictability, standardisation, and repetition. Schools were designed to prepare people for industrial economies where success depended on following instructions, memorising information, and performing structured tasks consistently.

But modern work no longer rewards people simply for what they know.

Increasingly, it rewards how they think.

The people thriving today are often not the ones with the most perfect academic records, but the ones most capable of adapting, communicating, solving problems, building relationships, and navigating uncertainty without collapsing under it.

That’s a very different skill set.

The Human Skills Nobody Taught Us

I realised this deeply when I became a people leader in global organisations. Early in my own career, despite working in banking and finance across Mexico, Brazil, and later the UK, I remember feeling deeply under-confident.

On paper, I had done everything “correctly.” I had the credentials, the experience, and the ambition. But internally, I still felt unprepared for the human side of work.

Nobody had taught me how to navigate ambiguity. How to advocate for myself. How to build meaningful professional relationships. How to deal with failure, visibility, confidence, or identity inside competitive environments.

Over time, I started observing something fascinating. The people progressing fastest were not always the most technically capable. They were often the people most comfortable questioning the status quo, taking calculated risks, communicating clearly, and adapting quickly when circumstances changed.

That observation completely changed the way I viewed education and career development.

Because traditional education tends to optimise people for certainty, while modern life increasingly demands adaptability.

AI Is Exposing the Cracks

And now AI is accelerating that gap even further.

For years, education prioritised memorisation and technical repetition - exactly the types of tasks artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable of automating. Drafting, reporting, repetitive analysis, administrative tasks, even parts of coding and research are already changing rapidly.

Meanwhile, the skills becoming more valuable are deeply human ones: judgement, creativity, communication, ethical reasoning, storytelling, emotional intelligence, and systems thinking.

In other words, the future may belong less to people who simply accumulate knowledge and more to those who can continuously reinterpret, connect, and apply it in changing environments.

The Rise of the Lifelong Learner

This is why I believe one of the most important skills today is becoming a lifelong learner.

Not in the performative sense of endlessly consuming productivity content online, but in the genuine sense of remaining curious, adaptable, and willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn throughout life.

Because careers are no longer linear.

Many of us were raised believing success was a straight ladder: education, job, promotion, stability. But modern careers increasingly look more like evolving ecosystems. People shift industries, build portfolio careers, pursue micro-credentials, reinvent themselves multiple times, and continuously adapt to new technologies and realities.

The problem is that many young people still interpret uncertainty as personal failure, when uncertainty has actually become a structural feature of modern life.

Spotted hyenas live in one of the most complex social systems in the animal kingdom - so sophisticated that researchers often compare their clan dynamics to primate societies.

They constantly adapt roles, alliances, and behaviour depending on uncertainty in the environment: food scarcity, threats, shifting group dynamics. Survival isn’t about control, it’s about adaptability.

Why Community Matters More Than Ever

And perhaps this is where community becomes so important.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through building community is that people learn most deeply in environments where they feel psychologically safe to ask questions, experiment, fail, and grow together.

Not through passive memorisation, but through dialogue, collaboration, mentorship, and shared experiences.

Real confidence rarely comes from consuming information alone. It comes from participation. From trying, reflecting, adjusting, and trying again.

That’s also why younger generations don’t need more pressure to have everything figured out immediately.

They need better environments to explore who they are becoming.

Maybe Young People Were Never the Problem

Maybe Millennials and Gen Z were never the problem.

Maybe they were simply handed outdated maps for a world that no longer exists.

And maybe the real challenge now is not preparing people for one fixed career path, but helping them develop the emotional resilience, adaptability, and self-awareness required to navigate many possible futures.

That, to me, feels far closer to what education should have been all along.

What’s one thing about adulthood, careers, or work that you wish school had actually prepared you for?

Subscribe now

We are finally talking more openly about burnout, anxiety, loneliness, and emotional wellbeing. But even with all this progress, there is still a quiet stigma around struggling - especially when everyone online seems to be thriving.

Every generation is carrying a different version of pressure.

Millennials are burning out while trying to balance careers, mortgages, children, aging parents, and the constant pressure to remain “relevant” in a rapidly changing workforce.

Gen Z, meanwhile, gets labelled as fragile or entitled, while many ignore the reality that they became the first generation to experience adolescence fully shaped by social media. Comparison is no longer occasional - it is constant. Every achievement, every milestone, every failure is now public.

And underneath all of this sits a deeper question:

Are we still following a formula that no longer works?

For years, the roadmap looked simple:

• Study hard

• Go to university

• Prepare for interviews

• Network with the right people

• Find mentors and sponsors

• Climb steadily upward

But is this even valid in today’s environment?

Let’s think about the reality facing young professionals today:

• In the US, the number of people with bachelor’s degrees has nearly tripled since 1990

• Youth unemployment still remains consistently higher than the national average

• US wages have risen far slower than housing, healthcare, and education costs over the last three decades

• The median US home price has increased from roughly $120K in 1990 to over $400K today

• Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off across tech, consulting, media, and finance

• AI is expected to automate or reshape millions of knowledge-work and entry-level tasks over the next decade

We are the most educated generation in history, yet job creation and economic stability have not evolved fast enough to match expectations.

And this is before considering the systemic barriers many people still face around access to education, financing, opportunity, and equality.

The result is a generation living in permanent uncertainty.

Take a couple in their 30s with two children and a mortgage. Even with two incomes, many are quietly living in survival mode. Layoffs in tech, consulting, media, and finance have created a culture of “job hugging” - people staying in roles out of fear rather than growth.

At the same time, we constantly hear about building a “portfolio career,” creating personal brands, monetising hobbies, and becoming endlessly adaptable. While that flexibility can create opportunity, it can also create stress.

Especially when you are already carrying family responsibilities, financial pressure, and the fear of becoming obsolete.

Now think about someone in their early 20s. They are navigating identity, career pressure, and purpose while being bombarded daily with curated success stories online. Everyone appears to be launching startups, travelling the world, becoming creators, or building wealth before 25.

Comparison has become a full-time environment.

And maybe this is why loneliness and anxiety feel so widespread despite us being more connected than ever.

Recently, I read a reflection from Ryu Spaeth that stayed with me:

“If the graduates of today are to survive, they will have to figure out how to do it together, keeping in mind that the older generations offering advice are bequeathing a world that in many ways is so much worse than the one they themselves inherited.”

That line captures something many people feel but struggle to articulate:

We are trying to solve modern problems with outdated assumptions about success.

For years, society conditioned us to optimise for individual achievement and external validation. Stand out. Compete harder. Build alone. Keep pushing.

But maybe the future requires the opposite.

In the wild, ostriches rely on collective awareness: one watches while others feed. Good collaboration is shared vigilance

Maybe resilience will no longer come from hyper-independence, but from collaboration.

Maybe success will depend less on appearing strong and more on building environments where vulnerability is safe.

Because right now, most people are overwhelmed quietly.

This is why wellness can no longer be treated as a corporate perk or a “nice to have.” We need to learn how to regulate our nervous systems, yes — but more importantly, we need spaces where honesty is normalised.

Spaces where people can admit:

• “I’m uncertain.”

• “I’m exhausted.”

• “I don’t know what the future looks like.”

• “I need support.”

Not because people are weak.

But because the environment itself has changed.

And perhaps the real challenge for this generation is not figuring out how to succeed alone, but learning how to build together in a world that increasingly makes people feel isolated.

Subscribe now

A year ago, I was in the middle of my notice period, leaving the job I had held for almost 10 years.

The feeling was difficult to explain.

I was about to leave a place I had called home for years - a place where I built meaningful friendships and grew both personally and professionally.

But something had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while.

Based on my own experiences - and a pattern I kept noticing around me - I could see that many young people were struggling quietly, but consistently. There was constant pressure to have everything figured out: careers, finances, purpose, identity.

And over time, that observation turned into a question I couldn’t ignore: What if I actually tried to do something about it?

Back in 2023, I started researching the future of education. I attended forums, events, and conversations about the state of education systems and the future of work.

Finding the time wasn’t easy, but somehow I managed to slowly get involved.

The Decision That Didn’t Make Sense on Paper

Eventually, I made a decision that seemed reckless to most people: I quit.

There was no clear plan and no real safety net - just a belief that there had to be a better way to support people navigating the early stages of their careers.

At the same time, I wanted to understand myself better

• Where could I actually create value?

• What kind of work gave me meaning?

• And most importantly, how did I see myself in the medium and long term?

I wanted to take the leap, see what happened, and adjust along the way. So that’s what I did.

I planned my finances carefully and gave myself roughly a one-year runway to experiment.

At one point, I even considered applying for a Master’s in Education. It helped me better understand my “why,” but it also made me realise something important: the most urgent thing I needed wasn’t another qualification, it was experimentation.

There’s a growing trend people call an “adult gap year” - stepping away from conventional paths to reassess life and direction.

I didn’t set out to take one. But that’s exactly what this became.

Maybe dissatisfaction comes from expectation. We accept nature as wild, unpredictable, and messy - perhaps if we viewed careers the same way, we’d enjoy the journey more.
(Photo: Arenal, Costa Rica)

What Followed: Saying Yes to Everything

I started saying yes to almost everything.

Events across the UK, Europe, and Mexico. Conversations with strangers. Books, podcasts, and ideas that made me uncomfortable in the best possible way.

I joined communities and fellowships that challenged me to think differently, but also required a level of vulnerability I wasn’t used to.

Being surrounded by people building, questioning, and redefining their own paths pushed me outside my comfort zone in ways I had never experienced before.

I went deep into education, entrepreneurship, and eventually AI - trying to understand where the future of work is actually heading.

But more importantly, I started testing ideas in the real world: Webinars, booth-camps, mentoring sessions across Mexico and the UK. Small communities that grew organically.

At one point, I partnered with local communities in Mexico simply to understand what genuinely creates value for people trying to navigate uncertainty.

Travel That Changed My Perspective

I also traveled across Southeast Asia - and that experience affected me more deeply than I expected.

Yes, the food was incredible. The places were beautiful. But I found myself constantly asking different kinds of questions:
Why does one country feel so different from another?
What shaped its culture, architecture, opportunities, and mindset?

Travel stopped feeling like leisure and started becoming perspective.

Going back to Mexico felt different too. I wasn’t just “home” anymore, I was observing things more critically: the effects of gentrification, the pressure on local communities, and the contrast between opportunity and reality.

At the same time, I reconnected with old friends and rebuilt relationships with people I hadn’t seen in years.

The Reality Underneath It All

Across all of these experiences, one thing became very clear:

The challenges young people face today are not abstract. They’re real, and they’re heavy.

Economic pressure. Global instability. The uncertainty created by AI. And underneath all of it, confusion about where we fit in.

I also realised that helping young professionals access better opportunities can’t follow the same formulas that worked in previous generations.

Something fundamental has changed. There is a growing mental health crisis deeply connected to uncertainty, comparison, and the rise of social media.

And I didn’t just observe it. I felt it too.

When Reality Hit

Then reality hit hard.

Trying to build something meaningful on my own started taking a serious toll. At one point, I had a panic attack after realising how quickly my savings were disappearing.

I was exhausted, not because I was running away from something, but because I was trying to build something meaningful too quickly and too alone.

That’s when something clicked. This isn’t just my story.

There is a massive, largely unspoken mental health challenge affecting young professionals, driven by uncertainty, lack of guidance, and systems that no longer match the world we are living in.

We’re told to “figure it out,” but we’re rarely given the tools, support, or environment needed to actually do that.

Stepping Back to Move Forward

So now, I’m doing something different. I’m stepping back in order to move forward.

Because I’ve learned something the hard way: You can’t build something meaningful while running on empty.

And you definitely can’t do it alone.

The Unexpected Lessons

If this year gave me one thing, it was the ability to pivot quickly and more importantly, safely.

And with that came a few lessons I didn’t expect.

1. Energy management is non-negotiable

Learning to identify what gives me energy - and what drains it - became critical.

Once you become aware of it, you can’t ignore it anymore.

2. Confidence comes from proximity

Confidence doesn’t come from having all the answers.

It comes from being in the right rooms, having the right conversations, and surrounding yourself with people who challenge you to think bigger.

3. Networking is about belonging, not transactions

Networking stopped feeling transactional and became a way to better understand where I truly belong.

4. Strengths matter more than gaps

I had to relearn something I had forgotten: my strengths.

For a long time, I focused too much on what I lacked and not enough on where I was already strong. This year forced me to recognise that again.

5. Experience helps you take better risks

Maybe most importantly, I learned to value my past experience differently.

Not as something to leave behind, but as something that allows me to take better risks - more intentional, more calculated, and with clearer boundaries.

And because of that, I feel stronger than ever.

Something unexpected and beautiful also happened along the way:

I’m now stepping into a role that aligns closely with the things I care most about, while still continuing to build toward the bigger vision I’ve been exploring throughout this journey.

If You’re Figuring Things Out Too

If you’re navigating uncertainty, questioning your path, or feeling the weight of trying to build something meaningful in a system that no longer fits the moment we’re living in - you’re not alone.

We’re all trying to figure it out in a world that is changing faster than the systems around us.

And maybe that’s exactly why we need to keep building anyway.

This is the first of many reflections I’ll be sharing as I continue this journey.

If any part of this resonated with you, I’d genuinely love to hear your perspective:
How are you navigating the future of work, growth, and uncertainty?

Let’s build this conversation together.

Share The Becoming Project

Becoming has long been framed as a destination - a title, a milestone, a version of ourselves we’re meant to arrive at. But that idea feels increasingly out of sync with the world we’re living in.

We are in a moment of rapid, often disorienting change. Entire industries are shifting. Skills that once felt secure are quietly becoming obsolete. Systems we trusted - education, career paths, retirement - are being questioned in real time. And yet, amid all this noise, many of us feel strangely unanchored, unsure of where we stand or who we’re becoming within it.

Spotted in the Serengeti — no destination, no urgency. Just movement

Across generations, people are navigating their own versions of this uncertainty.

Parents are rethinking what education should look like for their children in a world that no longer rewards predictability. Early-career professionals are rushing to future-proof themselves, chasing degrees and credentials in an attempt to stay relevant. Mid-career leaders are facing burnout, while quietly wondering how long their roles will remain necessary. And older generations are reconsidering what retirement even means when the future feels so fluid.

This newsletter was born from that shared tension.

The Becoming Project is a space to explore what it means to evolve - not just professionally, but personally - in a world that refuses to stand still. It’s not about having answers. It’s about asking better questions, noticing patterns, and building the tools to navigate change with more clarity and intention.

Through this project, I’ll be sharing my own journey - the shifts I’m experiencing, the ideas I’m wrestling with, and the tools and insights I’ve found along the way. Some will be practical. Some will be reflective. All of it will be honest.

If you’ve been feeling the pull to rethink your path, redefine success, or simply make sense of where you are right now - you’re not alone.

We’re all becoming something.

Let’s explore that together.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now