Vision of a 21st Century Renaissance

Hundreds of years from now, humanity will look back at this period as the emergence of the 21st century renaissance. We will be known throughout history as passionate explorers who awoke the human spirit of togetherness and united us around a vision of a future state where all people can be proud to be human!

The mere title of a “21st century renaissance” intrigues you because there is something about the world we live in today, the interactions we have with other people, and the institutions which govern our society that leaves us feeling deprived of deeper meaning and a sense of inspiration. We need to spark and be part of a 21st century renaissance that sets humanity down an updated path towards a more loving, hopeful, happy, and communal world.

In my North Star, I defined why I exist and set some guiding principals on how to move forward. But I didn’t fully articulate the future world I hope to become true. This post is my vision of a future we can enable together by sharing, connecting, hoping, and learning from one other to all discover and share our unique individual purposes to better the world.

In this post, I’ll:

1. Paint a picture of a future I envision and contrast it to today.
2. Advocate for the urgency of sparking this cultural revolution now.
3. Offer a framework to start a renaissance in our own lives and communities.

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Vision of the Future

I envision a future where all people see each other for who they could be, not for where they’ve come from or the actions they’ve taken in the past. We respect what’s come before; but we aren’t bound in shackles to the past. We join hands to look and pull each other forward. We trust that each human in this world has a unique value to bring to humanity, and we actively help each other find and share their unique strength to benefit our future generations.

I envision a future where life is seen as a shared existence and timeless journey where we all grow together to better tomorrow’s world, instead of viewing life as a race with winners and losers. We recognize that gains for one that comes at the expense of others isn’t sustainable for humanity in the long-run. We embrace the fact that each of us will one day cease to physically exist, yet our species will continue to flourish thanks to the contributions we made in our time alive.

I envision a future where we all have confidence on the direction the collective human species is heading, not fear that we’re doomed and our children’s lives will be worse than our own. We trust that humanity is good at its core and our collective potential is immense enough to overcome any challenge. We will work together to improve the world, one generation at a time; and we believe deeply and trust that progress is forever being made.

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Problems in Today’s World

We see others as potential enemies that could inhibit our progress towards our individual goals, instead of recognizing that we share a collective goal with every other human being. Even when trying to connect with someone, it takes too much time for another human to inherently trust us and know you are here to work together and help, not take from them.

We wonder and question our place in the world and the direction we’re heading in. We seek community yet are embarrassed to be vulnerable enough to openly share our feelings which is essential for building honest relationships. We yearn for more meaning, yet we are unsure of how to find it.

Ultimately our culture is the problem. It is too short-sighted and individualistic. We need a cultural revolution towards community building, sharing, and an investment in the future. We can’t wait for the next generation to do it; we can’t wait for our politicians to do it; we can’t trust that someone else will do it for us. We all must take ownership in humanity’s progress. And we must do it now!

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Why the Time is Now

Similarity to the 14th Century

In the 14th century, the world experienced a cultural rebirth and movement we affectionately refer to as the renaissance. This time experienced a resurgence in classical learning, an explosive interest in the arts and the humanities, and a renewed curiosity about understanding the human condition. It was during this time that Petrach, the Father of Humanism, posed a question to his contemporary thinkers on the importance of discovering why we exist.

What is the use–I beseech you–of knowing the nature of quadrupeds, fowls, fishes, and serpents and not knowing or even neglecting man’s nature, the purpose for which we are born, and whence and whereto we travel?

Petrach wrote this in his work Secretum in the 1340s.

Humanism is a movement that emphasizes the value of human capital where every individual has a unique potential to share their strengths for the betterment of the world around them. We can postulate that this emphasis on human potential was energized by the preceding Black Plague which highlighted the fragility of life. Political instability at this time was prevalent as can be seen with the once powerful Catholic Church weakening and splitting into multiple factions led by multiple popes (and ultimately splitting even further with the Protestant reformation in 1517) against a backdrop of splintering and bickering city state and country political institutions around it. This period was also aided by the emergence of the printing press in 1440 which democratized access to information to empower all people to learn and share knowledge.

Does any of this sound familiar to the world we live in today?! In the next section I’ll paint the picture of the path we’ve been on and how to move forward. But I’ll segue to that by adapting Petrach’s frustration back in the 14th century to today in the 21st century. Technological innovation should always be a focus, but now more than ever we must better understand humanity to direct technological research in a way to help humanity.

What is the point in studying and advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) without a parallel and stronger effort to understand humanity’s purpose, strengths, and direction? Then we can best position AI to complement and help advance humanity as an ally, instead of threatening our existence as a competitor.

Written by me, a man yearning to share his mind with others and learn the minds of people around him to discover ways we can collaboratively help humanity perpetually grow.

Convert the Negative Energy into Fuel to Propel Us to a Better Future

Humanity is at an inflection point. This can force the discovery of a defining epiphany for us that propels us forward or it risks creating an implosion we can’t recover from. I’m an optimist (one of my tenets is to Hope Tirelessly!), so I’m confident that this inflection point will be looked back on many years from now affectionately as the 21st century renaissance that sparked outsized growth and a positive transformation for humanity!

First, what has been the catalysts of change which have brought us to this inflection point?

1. Divisive Politics: The political system in the United States has become increasingly polarizing over the last few presidential cycles; but this has been a trend for decades. Republicans have been becoming more conservative while Democrats are becoming more liberal, furthering the divide between the two parties. This post from Pew Research that analyzes this underlying data is worth a quick read (and potentially the topic of a future post!). And this trend is not unique to the United States, it is occurring within other countries and between countries.
2. Pandemic: The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was exasperated by globalization and urbanization that brought the world economies and the people within them closer together and interdependent. This accelerated economic progress, but it also enabled the rapid and effective spreading of a novel coronavirus that yielded the most profound effects on our daily lives which were dependent upon the global trade that was shuttered.
3. Emergence of AI: The internet and the widespread adoption of mobile devices created a vast digital ecosystem that generates massive amounts of data. This infinite data lake served as a training ground for the emergence of generative AI capable of learning and evolving from the rich digital interactions of billions of people. The creativity and problem-solving potential of generative AI has the opportunity to revolutionize art, research, and automation; but our inability to fully understand and control how it arrives at the answers risks it generating malicious outputs that harm society.

This path that we’re on could set up our political system to become even more divisive to eventually tear our country and the world apart. Or… The political system could finally see the splitting of two parties along a foolish one-dimensional spectrum into five overlapping parties in a more sophisticated and collaborative two dimensional plane that represents and energizes all our people. The political interactions between nations could finally be transparent and trustworthy collaboration to work towards shared goals for humanity.

The COVID pandemic could result in countries becoming more entrenched in developing their independence and cutting ties with neighbors. Or… The world’s people and nations can recognize that we are truly one connected society with intertwined fates so that we become motivated to develop strategies that advance and better all countries and the world’s people.

Generative AI could lead to the downfall of humanity. Or… The capabilities of AI could be leveraged to complement humanity’s weaknesses while accentuating our strengths to solve some of our greatest challenges and unlock an unimaginably prosperous, loving, and hopeful future.

I am a hopeful optimistic so I know humanity will find a way to convert these negative trends into energy to fuel a positive transformation! The time is now to use this inflection point we’re in to jump to the next curve of humanity’s journey to advance forward for all!

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How to Start a Renaissance In Your Life

There is a lot that is needed to effectively reach this vision but it has to start with each and every single one of us taking an active part in shaping our future state. I know that I personally will be incapable of finding fulfillment until I can see the path forward beyond my existence that I helped enable. So let’s start by sharing our minds with one another to form the greatest collection of creative and powerful thinking that perpetually grows and advances humanity forward!

Start by sharing your mind with your friends, neighbors, and the world by exploring your unique art form. This will lead to connecting with others who can better see and understand you from your sharing which will in turn foster trust between you and others. Stronger relationships will enable hoping together on how we can work together to better ourselves and the world.

Our collective hope will energize ourselves to further share our minds with a world of people who are also sharing their own minds. This ecosystem of available, evolving, and current art will help us learn from others to influence and advance the beauty of our individual form of self-expression. From this learning and continued exploration, we will discover our purpose in this world which we passionately share with others to spin our infinity loop faster towards a future where all people are finding their unique place to better the world for all.

This cultural revolution can be initiated simply by having us all start to share our minds! But we also need changes in our foundational institutions to help encourage this growth and future mindset in a “top-down” approach to meet this “bottom-up” cultural revolution to spur lasting growth toward our vision of a better world.

1. Our education system needs to fairly and comprehensively educate all our people from a younger to a later age with a curriculum that balances technology and IQ against the humanities and EQ while also teaching important life lessons to navigate our political and economic systems.
2. Our political system needs to attract inspiring leaders that are more representative of our people and focused on the future instead of offering the same group of disconnected individuals clinging to power by attacking their opponents and serving up quick wins for the next election cycle.
3. Our economic and tax system needs to empower our people to control their own destiny while aligning their individual incentives with that of the greater good by giving them more control over how their tax revenue is spent so that we think of taxes as investments in the future we help directly shape.

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What’s Next?

This article has articulated the future I envision that I will point myself in a direction toward achieving. But how do I work with others to take meaningful steps along this path? What even is the path? How do I measure progress towards this? This is lofty, probably too lofty (but I have a tenet to Dream Big!), how do I break this down into goals that I can set and realistically achieve within my lifetime?

Now I need to do the hard product strategy work to simplify this into tangible next steps! Future posts will look to develop a career “roadmap” for myself, expand upon how we can build community at a local level, explore the political spectrum trend to propose a 5-party future model, offer frameworks and examples to convert negative anger and fear into positive energy and hope, and more!

Connect with me and/or subscribe to future posts at the bottom of this page so that we can learn from one another and collaborate to refine and develop actionable strategies to make meaningful progress towards a better world for all of humanity!

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Disclaimer on the Header Image

Writing may be my art form, painting is not! As a thank you for reading through my post, please take a moment to laugh at my cheesy header image that I generated with the help of DALL-E! I wanted to illustrate a 21st century renaissance by using AI to paint a hopeful picture of people aligned toward a positive and inspiring future that is painted in a style similar to 14th century renaissance art. I think the imagery in the “painting” works but it also makes me smile how intense it is!