What does the future look like when you’re in the middle of changing yours?
We were recently invited by Nicolas Fieulaine to run Images of the Future workshop with 36 participants of the Nouvelles Voies program at Institut Transitions. A year-long program reorienting careers toward ecological & social transition. People in the room were already doing something quite difficult: letting go of one way of working and building toward another.
We started where we always start, with two questions. What does your personal future look like? What does the global future look like?
The gap between the two answers was striking.
Personal future:
optimism 20 · enthusiasm 20 · calm 12 · uncertain 30 · anxious 10 · helpless 7 · indifferent 3
Global future:
uncertain 36 · anxious 31 · helpless 20 · calm 6 · optimism 5 · indifferent 1 · enthusiasm 0
The personal futures were full of texture. People drew trees, cabins in the mountains, birds. They wrote: nature, liberté, introspection, bonheur, paix intérieure. Family, children, time for activities they love, a work that inspires and motivates. Someone imagined white hair. Someone wrote “flou, mais c’est ok” (blurry, but that’s okay). Someone else: “incertitude mais stabilisant, un arbre qui prend ses racines” (uncertainty, but stabilizing, a tree taking root). The futures were modest in scale, sensory, relational. Uncertain, yes. But in a way that still left room for agency.
The global board was something else entirely. Crises, effondrement, guerres, sécheresse, conflits, en feu. Extermination du vivant. Someone wrote “ça sent le sapin” (it smells like a coffin). “Aïe aïe aïe.” One note said “nuancé, plus éclairé, mais pas suffisamment” (more nuanced, more aware, but not enough). Résilience appeared once. Enthusiasm: zero.
One participant put it directly: I have a hold on my personal future, but not on the global one. Which is a shared experience, not a failure of imagination. It’s a real psychological distinction. The personal future is where agency lives. The global future is where it goes quiet.
What held across both boards: nature as anchor. Trees, birds, forests, mountains appeared everywhere, on the personal side as where people locate safety and meaning, on the global side as what’s threatened. And connection as resource: family, children, intergenerational links, geographic and affective bonds. These are what make futures livable. Relational grounding, something shared.
What made this group particular was the context. These people were already choosing to act, already retraining, already building something new in the direction of transition. And still the gap held.
We see this tension across very different rooms, across countries. In Denmark and the United States, around 75% of participants describe the global future in predominantly negative terms. In China and India, roughly 65% describe it positively, shaped by different information flows, different meaning-making structures, and a more circular relationship with time..
We also talked about how time horizons have been shrinking since the pandemic. Before 2020, participants typically imagined personal futures 15 to 30 years out. Now it’s five years at most. Large collective events don’t just change how we feel about the future. They also change how far into it we can look.
Something new came up in this workshop. One participant said he couldn’t distinguish between his personal and global future, he experiences them as one and the same. We heard this for the first time a few months ago at Sciences Po. It’s making us think again about the concept of Balanced Time Perspective and deepens the direction of our research..
The workshop was facilitated by Anna Sircova, with Mariam and Galina Zhukova assisting. Thank you to Nicolas Fieulaine and Institut Transitions for the invitation, and to everyone in the room for bringing such openness to the questions.
If you’d like to bring Images of the Future workshop to your organisation, training program, or team, don’t hesitate to reach out!
