The New Megatrends: Seeing Clearly In The Age Of Disruption

In 2000, we did not plunge into turmoil because of a Y2K-created disaster, but neither did we ascend into a shiny new millennium in which spirited problem solvers would create guardrails for society. Instead, we slid into a two-decade period of economic and ecological downturns, terrorism, divisiveness, and extremism, all lived against a backdrop of newly digitized lifestyles.

Skip ahead two decades. By 2019, technology had become an even more pervasive and inescapable aspect of life, with an outsize influence not just on our behavior, but also on our opinions and beliefs.

In contrast to 1999, when well-deployed technological fixes helped avert a potential Y2K crisis, digital technology and the always-on mentality it brought were among the reasons we were ill-prepared to meet the threat of SARS-CoV-2. The insidious effects of constant connection, echo chambers, and the pervasive algorithms that had emerged over the intervening two decades had contributed to populations with little trust in institutions, an anti-expert mindset, and deep sociopolitical and ideological rifts that cast doubt on objective truths and provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories and obstructive behaviors.

Collectively, the world spent trillions of dollars over the past twenty years to avert or clean up and rebuild after disasters, to wage wars without clear-cut objectives, and to promote an economic model based on overconsumption—a model that has put us on a path to ecological catastrophe while rending the essential fabric of society in the process. What progress do we have to show for those trillions of dollars? Aside from basic advances in the standards of living of the people eking out an existence in the most impoverished places and some high-tech conveniences for the rest of us, how has daily life improved on planet Earth? Can most of us genuinely say we are better off than we were in 1999?

What might we accomplish if we were to allow the catastrophic events of 2020 to serve as a reset? If we took advantage of this unexpected crisis to reconsider what we want the future to look like? What if we took the time to consider deeply the lessons of the past twenty years and used that learning to conceive a better path forward?

We have an opportunity to start the century anew. The pandemic gave us that. It is time we reset our societal GPS, rerouting ourselves toward a better destination than that toward which we were heading at the start of 2020.

“Who first invented work and bound the free . . . to plough, loom, anvil, spade—and oh! most sad, to that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood?” English essayist Charles Lamb wrote those words in 1819. Two centuries on, society is taking steps to forge a more sensible way forward.

In 2038, hybrid approaches, including mixes of onsite and remote work, will be ubiquitous. Across industries, the Monday–Friday industrial clock will be replaced by asynchronous living. The luckiest among us will log on, work, and study when it suits our biological clocks, lifestyles, and household rhythms. Conventional offices will still exist, but many will serve as community centers for collaborating, hosting events, and meeting clients and partners rather than as primary workspaces.

One hundred years after U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, establishing a five-day, forty-hour workweek for many employees, a drop to a four-day workweek will be standard in many industries and countries.

There will come a day when parents have to explain to their children what a traditional office was like, or that a Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five, each day bracketed by a lengthy commute, was standard.