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We don’t suffer from a lack of imagination about the future. We suffer from too much of the same imagination.

Every deck, every keynote, every speculative prototype—still echoing the same tropes: chrome cities, self-driving pods, dystopian biotech. A future flattened by repetition. Familiar. Market-tested. Boring.

In episode 100 of the podcast, I caught up (again) with the gang at N O R M A L S.

We found ourselves circling this question: Why do so many futures feel interchangeable? And what would it take to build ones that aren’t?

Their proposal: Near future archetypes—modular, remixable worlds that aren’t just provocations but tools. Not just imagined futures, but working assets for innovation, policy, and design. Think less “trend report,” more “playable terrain.”

It’s a shift from one-off spectacle to living systems. Instead of discarding scenarios each year, why not iterate them? Build them out like open-source lore. Let them gain rules, friction, culture. Let them become strange enough to surprise us.

Because here’s the quiet truth: people don’t just adopt futures because they’re rationally compelling. They adopt them because they feel like home — familiar, evocative of something deeper, some feeling they have been chasing after, some vision of a world that probably goes back to the worlds they imagined when they were kids, or visions they integrated into their imagination that felt ‘cool’.

So maybe the work is not only to critique the dominant tropes, but to seed alternatives that others want to live in—and then give them tools to help build those places themselves.

Maybe the job isn’t just to map what comes next. Maybe it’s to make futures that feel like a place worth going.

What’s one overused future trope you’d like to retire—and what would you like to imagine instead?

https://normalfutu.re/nfa/nfa-essay-pt1/