The Futures We Inherited
Why we kept the limits of the past, but lost its imagination
Growing up in Melbourne, Florida, just an hour from Disney World, I spent more time than most kids wandering through visions of the future. My grandparents would generously gift us annual passes, so we went often. And while Magic Kingdom had the spectacle, it was Epcot that really hooked me.
Even as a kid in the early ’90s, I could tell Epcot’s future was outdated. But it was a cool kind of outdated—sleek monorails, geodesic domes, fountains synchronized to synthesizer-heavy anthems. Music coming out of rocks. It didn’t look like anything else I saw in real life, and that was part of the appeal. Epcot made a bold promise: the future would be coherent, designed, joyful. A place worth arriving at.
It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I learned about the park’s real history—and the utopian ambition behind what was supposed to be a city of tomorrow.
That early exposure imprinted something deep in me. And I suppose I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
Buckminster Fuller. The Venus Project. Genesis. Wings. Even now, music from that time feels as—or more—current to me than most of what’s made today.
Where some people find the aesthetic and sonic trappings of that era off-putting, I feel like I’m stepping back into a future that never quite happened—but maybe still could.
And yet, for all my emotional connection to that world, I’ve had to reckon with the intellectual baggage it carried.
The Hangover from the ’70s
In 2012, while working on my MBA at California College of the Arts, I took a course called Strategic Foresight & Futures. The instructor, Stuart Candy, was smart, inventive, and had studied under the influential futurist Jim Dator at the University of Hawaiʻi. I was genuinely excited to dig into frameworks for thinking critically about the future.
But as the course unfolded, I started to notice something odd. We spent a lot of time revisiting concepts from the 1970s—overpopulation, resource scarcity, collapse scenarios. It felt like we were teaching directly from The Population Bomb or Limits to Growth, often without acknowledging just how much the data, the context, and our capacity to solve problems had changed.
At the time, I brushed it off as academic momentum. But over the years, I began to see it in more places—architecture, environmentalism, even food culture. Brilliant people, creatively engaged, still operating on outdated assumptions. As if we were still in 1974, still waiting for the whole thing to fall apart.
We Kept the Limits, Not the Vision
This is the part that haunts me:
We seem to have carried forward all the fears of that era—but none of its aesthetic courage.
We’re still suspicious of nuclear power, even though it’s among the safest and cleanest energy sources we have.
We’re still clinging to restrictive zoning laws born of 1970s panic about sprawl and disorder.
We’re still invoking overpopulation, despite the demographic collapse unfolding in much of the developed world.
And yet, the buildings we’re constructing today are largely soulless. The urban spaces we create are risk-averse. The dominant aesthetic is neutral, minimalist, efficient—and utterly forgettable. It’s as if we traded visionary mistakes for banal stagnation.
For all its shag carpet and mansard roofs, the ’70s also gave us some of the boldest design experiments of the 20th century. Domes. Modular houses. Visionary megastructures. It wasn’t cohesive, but it was trying.
We forgot how to dream. And we’re still afraid to build.
The Split I Can’t Unsee
This tension plays out in my own life constantly. I eat entirely vegetarian, more by instinct than ideology, and have always been drawn to the natural-living ethos that largely emerged in the ’60s and ’70s. But I also believe deeply in modern agriculture’s role in feeding the world. I agree with economists like Bryan Caplan on the need for density and deregulation—but I wouldn’t want him designing my city.
The people with the clearest, most current ideas often have no aesthetic vision. The people with the richest aesthetic instincts often haven’t updated their thinking since the Carter administration.
What I find myself yearning for is a marriage that rarely happens:
The emotional ambition of retrofuturism, paired with the clarity and pragmatism of present-day progress.
Not just domes for nostalgia’s sake. But domes that work.
Not just vegetarianism as identity. But food systems that scale.
Not just cities as museums. But cities that are beautiful and expansive.
Reclaiming a Future Worth Building
This isn’t about nostalgia. I don’t want to rewind the tape. I want to ask: what did that era get right emotionally? What design values and imaginative courage have we lost? And what would it look like to bring those forward—without the deadweight of its dated ideas?
We don’t need to recreate Epcot. But we might need to steal its spirit.
Because the future, as it’s currently being built, doesn’t seem to believe in itself. It’s careful, narrow, and under-designed. What we need now is a bolder synthesis—one that’s not afraid to look weird, sound lush, and dream bigger than the algorithm would prefer.
If the 1970s gave us bad ideas in beautiful forms, the present seems determined to flip the formula.
We’ve got better models now—clearer data, sharper thinking, more tools.
But the defaults haven’t caught up.
The vibe is gone. The frameworks linger.It’s the future, allegedly. But it still runs like a legacy system.