Welcome to Wherever You Are. Again.
A future-self experiment for anyone who’s feeling stuck
WARNING: This will be slightly different from my usual schtick. Less economics, more… humanities.
Imagine you already had a billion in the bank. No guilt, no scarcity, no financial goalposts left. You may have heard of this before but mostly what people do is still a lottery winners box-ticking of fantasies.
I wanted to really get under the hood and do it properly.
What would you do next? It’s a thought experiment I’ve done before and I ran it again recently.
You know that feeling when the thing that used to feel expansive suddenly starts to feel… boxed in?
That.
If you’ve been sensing something similar – like the spark’s gone a bit dim or the direction’s got a little fuzzy – blame it on AI, the summer lull, the unbearable lightness of being a creative civic futurist like me, or whatever – you’re not alone. Sometimes, stepping back isn’t optional, it’s essential.
It’s how new direction sneaks in.
And here’s something weird. Whenever things have gone quiet in me - and that lull could be work related, a break from routine or just a feeling of stuckness - I’ve found that the lull is there precisely because there’s some lesson I’m refusing to learn. Times like this, I often feel as if surrounded by a vast unseen intelligence that kind of puts this huge hand on my head and turns it (metaphorically obvs) as if to say ‘check this out’.
Could be a muse effect, could be my higher self or God (think he’s a little busy tbh), could be our collective unconscious. The naming convention is largely unimportant. This message is what counts.
And as soon as I receive the message loud and clear and act on it - it’s as if the carousel slowly starts up again. It’s crazy I know but it’s happened too many times to deny it.
I’m thinking of this update as both a letter to you and a letter from my future self to my now self as a sort of metaphysical nudge.
What the billionaire thought experiment reveals
One framing that I’ve found helpful at various times in my life is to imagine I already have a billion in the bank. Then run the scenarios.
It needs to be an absurd number, otherwise you’ll start rationalising it and fitting your existing mindset into a lower, more realistic number (if only I had another £150k etc).
So you’ve got your billion.
Now - you’ve also had the money for a while. You’re not new, new money. That means that any material thing you want – you’ve had already. If you’re the alpha-male type, you’ve already had your superyacht phase - sun-drenched decadence, designer companions, champagne-soaked everything. It got… repetitive.
Ok some of you might dwell here for a bit let me know when you’re done.
Aaaand after that…
Maybe you want artistic recognition. So you’ve had all the free time and professional guidance and training you can get and just received your 10th Academy Award or Grammy or whatever.
Or instead, you’ve got the loving family (see, this isn’t just leading to more propaganda to have kids and keep your head down and be humble).
Maybe you’ve bought your parents the mansion they deserve.
How do you feel now? Good?
Can you hold on to it for a moment? If you can, you can ask yourself if this is something you really need to experience or whether it’s a fantasy or a ‘nice to have’.
Will it make you feel alive? Is that thing really the key to unlocking you? Or after you’ve had those experiences would you want to return to the person you are and just tell an interesting pub story?
In short, you will ankle tap yourself along the way if it’s not in alignment with the nature of your being as it exists in your bones. This is not a provable hypotheses (or disprovable) - just my experience in life.
The superyacht isn’t what you hoped.
It’s mostly waiting, mild nausea, and awkward conversation. Everyone runs out of things to say by day three. You start fantasising about being somewhere smaller, quieter, and less curated.
The awards don’t help.
After your tenth trophy, you feel more pressure than ever. Every idea is a test. Every silence feels like failure. You miss the days when no one cared what you made.
The loving family is beautiful – and brutal.
There’s love, yes. But also sleep deprivation, endless logistics, and an intimacy that has to be pencilled into a shared calendar.
You buy your parents a mansion – and their guilt with it.
They thank you, then apologise for the utility bills. You’ve changed their circumstances, not their wiring. It’s still your emotional labour to manage.
In order to have those experiences you’d need to consistently be the sort of person that does that. It’s possible to rewire your mind and move into a different world but it requires dedication and a clear map of your current world framing. Then you’d need to change it.
Not many of us have the capacity to be billionaires because of this (I mean this in a good way).
Kevin Kelly made a comment recently in an interview that is parallel to this:
“Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”
It’s not to say that anyone reaching for Greatness will automatically be a dick, but it is definitely a form of extremism that will force you to be restricted in other ways to achieve and maintain it.
The point of the exercise is: What would you do the day after you get back from the SuperYacht / Awards Ceremony / Mansion handover to mum and dad?
How would you spend your time when all the outside status and ego stuff is sated?
Go further.
You do a Tony Robbins (seems to be doing his best to not be a dick bless ‘im) and you help create 100 billion meals globally from donations before 2033 1
You fund a breakthrough tech that converts the world to unlimited solar energy.
You bring together the brightest minds in political science to help broker a breakthrough solution to the Gaza crisis – one that is peaceful, just, and beautifully conceived.
You show how all global debt can be paid off without crashing the economy.
And yet… the world is still a hot mess.
New problems arise that we couldn’t even fathom in 2025:
Deadly bio-weapons can now be made in a garage: A teenager with a CRISPR kit and a grudge becomes a geopolitical threat.
Our digital ghosts now outlive us – and they’re up for sale: Your AI self is doing Camoes to distant family long after you’re buried.
Culture flattens into a vanilla stream of machine-made swill that creates its own Love-Island-lottery-winning-gameshow-ARpornosphere that people don’t even know they’re in anymore, let alone escape from.
Justice is outsourced to code no one can audit: An algorithm decides your digital footprint makes you a potential fraud and no one, not even the company that provides the profiling service, knows why.
The world outside of you will always be a mess. And it will invent new messes (or at least, potential ones we’ll only have to watch in a Black Mirror episode)
Sure, as we progress, we’re going to be left solving a better class of problem (see starvation vs obesity), but the world around us is not a puzzle that will ever be completely solved.
Because what you see out there is also here for others to learn from – and you cannot take away their lessons. Or yours.
If whatever you want fixed in the world is a precondition for fixing how you feel inside, it will fail. Because the list of problems is as endless as the human capacity for creativity.
One of my all-time favourite writers, Iain Banks, was asked about money and fame (I’m paraphrasing as I can’t find the interview) - he said If you’ve got money and fame and you’re still not happy or fulfilled, you’ve got no escape. You know it’s you.
This is what the billionaire thought experiment reveals.
So what transforms it?
It’s almost embarrassingly simple to say.
Love.
Too woo for you?
Love is a word that has become a bit hallmark really. A bit Love Actually. If I was being perfectly honest, I’d prefer everyone got re-sensitised to the word agápē - unconditional or divine love as opposed to romantic love or eros.
But let’s stick with the common, modern phrasing.
Love without syrup. Love as orientation, not emotion (though it can be). Not something you get from others, but something you become in their presence.
Not “do what you love” – that’s another externally-sourced trap, often repackaged as meaning or purpose or ikigai or whatever we’re calling it this quarter.
I’m talking about feeling the love inside you that transforms any interaction with the outside world before it’s apparent to you that it exists.
If it’s not there, you need to find it and cultivate it first. Then, everything else that’s added on is powered by that love. And then things change.
Yes, it’s a kind of magic like that. It’s not rational and it can’t be reduced to a technique.
*Note to self: you David, are not a perfect example of this yet with your occasionally grumpy political takes.
Remember this is also a fly-on-the-wall peek at how I process the mess. I just happen to processing it publicly. If any of it helps, take it. If not, toss it
Back to it…
I bet you’d still like to start out a billionaire now and just see if you can manage – and perhaps at least not learn the lesson for a little while yet while you spread the love-money around al-la-MacKenzie Scott? Fine but feel the emotion you would feel if you were to do, or accomplish, whatever it is you would do.
Slowly but surely, using this method, I’ve felt some shifting in my interests – or more accurately, a sharper focus is emerging.
In my case, it’s not so much what new thing to start doing, but what not to do.
I have some things I want to do professionally and personally a bit less but in the passion side-hustle thing that is whatever this is - I’ve realised through all this writing and researching, that the thing I end up coming back to is this. I feel the closest to being me, when I’m writing.
When I’m occasionally able to be a conduit for something way bigger than me and put together something that makes me say: ‘Oh yes, I didn’t know it til now, but that is the thing I want to see in the world.’
It’s an urge to merge. It’s the showing up of unassigned energy - seeking a shape. In my case that shape is art, in the form of video and writing.
Sure I want to balance it with a few deep connections to people I care about, to cook, make cocktails for friends, keep in shape, travel a bit and have nice unexpected experiences of course, but that’s about it.
It’s a pretty simple life and that’s ok. Maybe that’s all a lot of people want in their own way. It’s ok if you don’t. But finding out what’s true, ignoring the white noise and sticking to it is hard.
Beyond my personal focus - it’s also made me realise that any new, decentralised global culture or politics will miss the point entirely if we pretend agápē doesn’t belong in it.
What’s the point of building a new scaffold just to hang old hatreds on?
We should be asking how we can make a future vision of the world fun and interesting again? Multi-planetary species on its own is actually way too limiting an idea because the world you very quickly end up in is the world of Gattica. Doom about climate change doesn’t inspire either as I’ve written about before.
But, reverence for our progress and even for our mistakes might do it. Agape sees us for where we are. Flawed, floundering human beings maybe, but still collectively brilliant and worthy of love. In fact a future that also seeks to reduce everything to a set of pass or fail metrics for humanity strikes me as not worth having at all.
And it can be done. Look how Gaudi transformed the dreary, dogmatic christian view of the world into something organic and living again by pouring his love into architecture. On a recent visit to Barcelona I was reminded of just how astonishing - no overwhelming - agápē is when acted upon at scale.
It’s almost enough to make me be interested in organised religion generally (I’m still not).
Because our turn is coming to tell a bigger story and we better damn well have an answer. What will the story of our time be? Connection? Catastrophe? We need to stop believing we have no influence on the outcome.
First off, we should aim to include people we disagree with – especially people we disagree with.
How to live in a broken-but-hopeful world
Yesterday on a bike ride, I stopped at a park café in Croxley for a coffee. Two older gents - maybe in their 70s - admired my road bike and struck up a chat. Four minutes in and wham, the subject abruptly turned to immigration.
It’s a loaded subject in the UK, and I get that it should be talked about. To me it’s complex and connected to economics much more than anyone will accept on either side. But these weren’t thoughts. These were recycled Nick Ferrari and Nigel Farage soundbites which are everywhere on social media. Still, I didn’t argue. I listened.
Not because I thought I could change their minds - but because I wanted to feel agápē for them. And for the moment.
When they seemed convinced I was on their side - I mean, I’m Anglo, I blend – I gently offered a small detail.
“But I’m an immigrant. Came here on a plane. Stole a job and a woman.”
They laughed and brushed it off. But you could tell it was uncomfortable for them. Of course you’re okay, because… well, you know, nudge, nudge.
Maybe I was having a Louis Theroux moment. But it stuck with me.
We don’t just meet people for our learning (although I did learn something). Sometimes, we’re part of theirs.
But you can only be that if you come from a position of agápē. Because when it comes down to it, you have no idea what’s possible.
Put it another way: Things get way more interesting and changeable when you do.
Are you listening David? Don’t make me use my big hand to turn your head and make you look again. (I think the muse was just toying with me a bit here).
Everyone’s right to be frightened of some aspects of the emerging world. Old agendas now have superpowers and will be exploited for political and profit making ends.
Human vulnerability - especially the economic kind - feels like the weakest link in the future that’s coming. If we don’t address it head-on, we’ll keep hearing the same cry from the margins: that people are powerless, forgotten, replaceable.
And in a world where your competition isn’t sinews or synapses but brushless motors and bytes, no amount of “hard work” is going to change that.
Which is why well-resourced individuals and publicly funded services - where democracy demands them – shouldn’t be treated as some political inconvenience. They’re one of the few visible, structural forms of agápē we still have.
Maybe a global solution to precarity would largely halt ecomomic migration to a handful of adventurous idiots like me (I’ve started again in a new country four times)
If you wanting a more detailed dive on other possible real world outcomes and policy options for the near future, check out
’s work. You’ll get a fast track on ways to address the coming Post Labor Economy - his term. I’ve much about the same things with different focus too so perhaps check out my back catalogue:But we should also remain excited about our new capabilities. As much as the power and capabilities of big tech are rising, everyone has access to these new tools.
Something Scott Britton pointed out in one of his articles was poetic and true:
“Humans only get access to capacities which can further collective evolution when they are ready for them. This holds true with our technological innovation (he was referring to AI).”
Or in more filmic terms:
“There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was meant to come to you, in Bilbo’s keeping. You were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”
Despite the headlines, the world is unfolding a gigantic story that we can sometimes glimpse but never fully grasp and our ‘job’ is to unfold with it and grow.
So since we’re in that season where everyone and their dog is recommending summer reads and must-hear podcasts (yes, even the AI who invented fake books for the Chicago Sun-Times – oops!), I thought I’d offer up a few that actually exist – and actually help.
These are the ones that don’t just tell you how to be more productive, but how to reconnect to whatever-the-hell-it-is that made you start looking for answers to big questions in the first place.
The spark. The sublime.
Because love gets back into you through the sublime and the beautifully unexplained.
From there, you can cultivate it.
My promise to you (and myself remember?) is to put agápē back into my work and take the brakes off. I know the world is a tangled up necklace of pearls. But dammit, what choice do we have except to leap into the unknown and hope the universe catches us somehow?
It was ever thus.
Pity the billionaires who have it all, but they still fear their house of cards collapsing on a larger scale. Otherwise why would Peter Theil have his back up armageddon bolt hole in New Zealand? No amount of money can hide you from that level of emptiness.
So if you’re up for a creative refill - or just need a good reason to get out of your own head - I’ve got some non-fiction gems that might just bend your mind back into alignment. Might even inspire you. They're go-tos that I've returned to for many years.
War of the Art - Steven Pressfield. At first sounds like it's only for writers but it's about reframing creativity as a war against entropy. Brilliant and unexpected.
The Creative Act - Rick Rubin (I prefer the audible version with Rick's own voice which is quite hypnotising! I'll say no more, you're in for a treat.
Whatever you think Think the Opposite - Paul Arden (yes THAT Paul Arden). Small picture book of 'what the hell just hit me?'
He’s already up to around 30 billion btw.
"I’ve found that the lull is there precisely because there’s some lesson I’m refusing to learn. " Yep That hits home.
The MIT Philosopher, Kieran Setiya, in his book "Midlife" talks about the problem-solver's dilemma. He says (paraphrasing off memory):
"If you eliminated every negative in the world, you'd still only be back at zero."
We need reasons to live. Activities and people we love. Things that move us. Grant us meaning. Those are the +'s.