My Passion is the Future

My name is James Evans and my passion is the future… for me, you, and Humankind as a whole. In order to explain what I mean by that, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself for context. I’m a 31 year-old male, born and raised in Northern Virginia. I have a loving family and a job that doesn’t pay as much as it should. The only form of creative expression I have any talent for is writing, but I regularly feel as if I’d be neglecting other parts of my life by doing so with regularity. I am rarely satisfied with anything and I’ve almost never shown people any of my writing. If I publish this, it will be my first published work associated with my actual name, but far from my first written work ever. The topic of this challenge from Vocal™ and Memberful™ is an important one because in our society: if you want the time to commit to your passions, you need to monetize them. They’ve challenged Vocal™ members to do just that. This got me not only considering my passions, but also heavily weighing my options for ever making a living from them. I’m a passionate person. I’m passionate about passion, I’m passionate about other’s passions, but most importantly: I’m passionate about progress, innovation, and improving and expanding on the human life experience. All of these are things I associate with the future. I struggled with that in the past. I believe that many of today’s best science-fiction and futurism writers are inspired not by personal visions of a better world, but exclusively by research done only on the technologies that modern science informs us will potentially exist in the near future. That’s where I hope my future readership will recognize a few qualities of mine, through my writing, that they want to see more of: vision, imagination, and a genuine desire for improvement both person and in the world at large.

As a young child, I was impulsive and happy. I slowly became more anxious and fearful as I was exposed to the world and had experiences where my innocent expectations lead to some harsh lessons. As I became more anxious, I devoted more and more of my mental energy to worrying about the future and how to prepare for situations that were going to potentially come up. Comprehending the threats, problems, obstacles, and other challenging events that I might face on any given day was just what I tried to do before I got out of bed in the morning. Often after a series of dreams and nightmares entirely focused on warning me about future stressful situations. I’d sit on the bus to school, listening to music from my CD player quite obviously, while inwardly going over hypothetical situations and my potential options for action or response to them for the entire trip. It was never enough time. I dreaded the impending future. I was on the internet regularly discussing world news and roleplaying my own fictional characters with other people from the age of 12. The world only seemed more impossibly incomprehensible as I learned more. I was young, and quickly finding out that adults didn’t have any special knowledge, while many of them had serious mental or emotional problems. I felt I could be the type to have them myself and even though I got a grasp on my nightmares, I was deeply anxious and avoided anything potentially embarrassing. This method of dealing with the world did have advantages: I was always hyper-alert in social settings, and even when I wasn’t actively participating, I was studying other people’s failure so that I could avoid them personally. I often knew more about other people than they knew about me, which made me more alluring while I brought up topics that I knew they’d enjoy discussing. This whole time, I was still active online in debates and discussions. I talked with people from all backgrounds about their beliefs and why they thought the way they did. I was learning a lot, especially about which sources to trust and which to be skeptical about. With that growing knowledge-base: came my first real confidence.

You see… I was always a competent person. I learned everything quickly. The rate at which I grew more skilled or knowledgeable was generally faster than my peers, and if that seemed in doubt, I was always able to put in a little effort and make sure of it. This resulted in something of a natural confidence, but it was confidence that was easily shattered. Any kind of consistent failure or honest mistake hurt me severely because I didn’t feel prepared for this world regardless of my apparent competence. A world where one mistake or miscommunication could mean I suddenly exist in a world I don’t want to be in: surrounded by malice and apathy because the people who matter at that moment think differently than I do. I’ve always felt like my problem was with being understood. I practiced my writing online because I wanted to KNOW that I could write in a way that could convey complex ideas to another person successfully. I wanted to tell myself that when someone failed to understand me, it was on them, because I made sure the meaning was there to be understood.

It was a true enough idea to comfort myself with, but not entirely true for so many other reasons… Psychology and Sociology helped me grasp a lot of what I needed to come to terms with, Philosophy and Theology helped with the rest. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve dealt with my nightmares through lucid dreaming, my anxiety is managed, and I’ve come to realize some things about myself and the world. Things like: Humans are probably the best sentient creatures on this planet at processing and disseminating complex information; We are probably the beings on this planet with the strongest potential level of comprehension and understanding; I have some unique knowledge and understanding that could be applied to help other people. Now… I’ll admit I used some wiggle-words with the first two declarations, but even without that I can see it being easy to be skeptical of that last line. I’ll just say that I’d really like that chance to prove myself and help others prove themselves, and I believe I’ve got plenty of unique insight and wisdom that could help every person, industry, and human endeavor.

Humanity as a collective, and definitely certain individuals within our species, are far smarter than our society has allowed us to exemplify. Every society currently in existence is knowingly flawed and jury-rigged to keep things moving, while those acting within the government and society itself bicker over the proper changes to make. People just accept this. Governments today largely have the power to monitor their entire population as well as the power and technological advantages necessary to control that society entirely, if needed. People largely accept this while trying not to think about it and the massive lack of accountability in our current power structures. The current expectation in business is for corporate leadership to make themselves rich while exploiting their lower-level employees for as little cost to them as possible. We have corruption being called out in every level of Government and Business and it is rarely addressed in ways that deter the villains that we DO catch, let alone the one’s we don’t. People are still mostly way too accepting of this. This is because few people admit the full severity of the situation to themselves because they don’t feel they have the power to address the problem… It’s an understandable feeling, but my Dad always said “Even the dumbest person in the room has something to teach you”, a somewhat condescending way of saying that even the smartest person in any room doesn’t have the full picture. We need to start listening to those with the best ideas, because they are out there. To that end, we should be happy that platforms like Vocal™ and Memberful™ are being created.

I’ve got experience in a couple dozen jobs, having starting as an Civilian Army Contractor for IT and doing work for government and corporate IT contracts, then moving between everything from Package Truck Loader to Data Recovery Technician to various retail positions and specialties. My professional knowledge is expansive and I am purposely staying aware of the latest news and developments in multiple economic, scientific, and political spheres. I am empathize with a wide range of experience and if I cannot empathize, then I at least understand from a logical perspective. Many people can say these things, and yet I claim to have unique insight? Yes, but only as unique as realistically possible. I’m not naive. I’ve spent literal years looking for good, original ideas. The truth is that there is very little chance that you can think up something these days hasn’t been thought up by someone else before… but that’s not exactly the whole truth. To me, the truth is tragic, because the truth is that hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions of people, out there and through-out history, with intelligence and creativity were not in the right positions to capitalize on their best ideas or even bring them into the popular consciousness. Not because they didn’t recognize the possible value either. In most cases: Powerful people with financial motivations skewed or continue to skew popular opinion and obscure what the proper course of progress should be. A famous example would be the famous battle between Tesla and Edison over Direct or Alternating Current. Just to sum it up: Tesla had the right idea with Alternating Current, but Edison famously went so far as electrocuting an elephant in his wild attempts to manipulate public opinion. We are lucky that didn’t work, or Edison would have been responsible for delaying progress for years. We don’t live in a society that prizes the truth above all, we live in a society that prizes money above all, and until that changes: Good people with great ideas will struggle and be forgotten. The people making money off of the present structures have no reason to care for future structures that they aren’t prepared to capitalize on personally. We don’t have a Meritocracy in any society. We have no society designed by modern understanding. We have no government or corporate structures immune to corruption and ruination.

Do you think that’s because there aren’t people thinking of those things? Screaming into the void that “We need change! Listen to my idea for what we can do here!” and going ignored or being actively silenced by those who lack vision? There’s no way I’m the first, so why aren’t we hunting down those people? Why are we not methodically pruning, redesigning, and restructuring society through conscious direction for continuous upward mobility? It is not because we lack visionaries, but because we don’t have the systems in place to encourage and give them a proper voice! That is exactly why platforms like Vocal and Memberful™ are important. Platforms of all sorts give those with vision methods with which they can climb and be heard! These are the types of things that our society and humanity needs to see the current and future value in. The ability to recognize value is one of the most important skills someone with an eye towards the potential future needs. With this writing: I’m hoping you can see I have that value and that skill. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. I just want a chance to prove it, or be proven wrong. I have very little free time with a full-time job and three little ones, but I intend to start writing whenever I can on Vocal in order to keep sharp, get some commentary, and maybe find a way to build a readership that can help me grow across a different trellis, because I’ve just about reached my limits while writing for no audience.

Ultimately, I’m trying to convey many different things here, so I will try to sum them up conclusively: I am a visionary with a passion for the future in every sense. I hope to write primarily about problems we as humans currently face or could face in the potential future, and how ideas that already exist could be applied to address them. I intend to do this through what will ideally be both Non-Fiction and Fictional writings that display the ideas involved in unique ways. My ideal would be to use Vocal primarily, with outreach on Facebook™, Instagram™, and Twitter™ for announcements and such. Most importantly though: I’d want to foster active discussion that I could personally be involved in. I want a dialogue with my insightful supporters. This would be where Memberful™ comes in. Memberful™ allows for me to sell books and merchandise with taxes applied. It let’s me sell memberships to forums where I personally discuss things with my readership. It’s got more functions than I can imagine, but nothing I can’t see myself potentially using. It also seems pretty easy. I mean, I’ll have Reddit™ for free discussion, and Patreon™ as an alternative for some functions, but Memberful™ is everything I’m looking for and more with regards to monetizing my passion for the future. I plan on having two science/speculative fiction stories out within the next week, posted on Vocal! If people end up liking what they see and are inspired to think about the future, I won’t have to waste time looking for ways to capitalize. Consistent content is key to maintaining strong readership, and if I can quit my day job to do more research and more writing, I would do everything in my power, using all the tools available to me to provide that consistent quality content and reward those people who saw value in my writing. I have a mind full of ideas and a voice aching to be heard.