Mark: Most people think the best way to prepare for the future is to make a solid, logical plan. What if the key is actually to get a little bit ridiculous, and start playing games? Michelle: Playing games? To prepare for, what, the apocalypse? That sounds like my teenage son's excuse for not doing his homework. Mark: It might sound that way, but that's the core idea in the book we're diving into today: Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything by Jane McGonigal. It’s all about training our imagination as a practical, and even life-saving, skill. Michelle: And she’s not just a theorist; she’s a world-renowned game designer. I read that she even created a game to help herself recover from a traumatic brain injury, which became the basis for her book SuperBetter. So she lives this stuff. Mark: She absolutely does. And her work at the Institute for the Future led to one of the most chillingly accurate 'games' ever played, one that gave its players a strange and powerful advantage when reality caught up.

Michelle: An advantage how? What are we talking about here? Mark: We're talking about a pandemic. In 2008, more than a decade before COVID-19, McGonigal and her team ran a massive online simulation called Superstruct. They asked nearly ten thousand people to imagine living through a global respiratory pandemic set in the fall of 2019. Michelle: Hold on. This was in 2008? And they set it in 2019? That is… eerily specific. What were they trying to find? The winning lottery numbers for 2020? Mark: Not quite. They weren't trying to predict the virus itself. They were trying to predict us. The simulation wasn't about mathematical modeling; it was about social and emotional intelligence. They asked people: What would you do? How would you feel? How would society change? Michelle: So they were crowdsourcing the human drama of a pandemic. What did people come up with? Mark: The results are what make this so fascinating. The players predicted, with stunning accuracy, things the epidemiologists missed. They predicted that people would resist wearing masks, not for scientific reasons, but because it felt socially awkward. They predicted that weddings and funerals would become superspreader events because people couldn't bear to miss them. Michelle: Wow. They even foresaw the social conflicts. Mark: They did. They predicted that young people would keep partying, that working moms would be crushed by the burden of homeschooling, and that without significant economic support, people simply couldn't afford to follow public health guidelines. These were all major themes of 2020, imagined in detail back in 2008. Michelle: That’s incredible. So what was the point? Just to prove they could see it coming? Mark: Here’s the real payoff. When the COVID-19 pandemic actually happened, McGonigal surveyed the former players of Superstruct. Overwhelmingly, they reported feeling less anxiety, less shock, and less helplessness than their peers. They adopted safety measures like masks and social distancing more quickly and willingly. Michelle: Because they’d already been there, in a way. It’s not about being a psychic, it’s about running a dress rehearsal for your emotions. Mark: Exactly. McGonigal calls it "pre-feeling" the future. There’s a saying at the Institute for the Future: "It’s better to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality." These players had already processed the initial shock in a safe, fictional environment. When the real crisis hit, their brains didn't freeze. They were ready to act.

Michelle: Okay, that simulation is incredible, but most of us aren't in a high-tech futurist game. How does a regular person start 'pre-feeling' without getting completely overwhelmed? I saw that some reader reviews of the book found it could be a bit anxiety-inducing. Mark: That's a fair point, and McGonigal provides a very accessible starting point. Her first step is simple: stop thinking about tomorrow or next year. Instead, take a ten-year trip into the future. Michelle: A ten-year trip? That just sounds like daydreaming. What's the real difference between that and, say, a New Year's resolution to 'be healthier in 2034'? Mark: The difference is the detail and the psychological distance. She calls the technique Episodic Future Thinking, or EFT. It’s the ability to mentally transport yourself forward in time and pre-experience an event with sensory detail. And the ten-year mark is the magic number. Michelle: Why ten years? Why not five, or twenty? Mark: Because ten years hits a sweet spot for our brains. When you think about next year, your imagination is still tethered to your current reality—your job, your budget, your problems. It's hard to imagine radical change. But ten years is far enough away that your brain treats your future self almost like a different person. Neurologically, the part of your brain that thinks about 'you' becomes less active. Michelle: That’s wild. So my brain sees 'me in 2034' as some other guy it doesn't know very well? Mark: In a way, yes! And that disconnect is liberating. It creates what McGonigal calls "time spaciousness." It frees you from today's constraints and allows you to be more creative and ambitious. You're not just planning; you're building a detailed, sensory memory of a future that doesn't exist yet. Michelle: Ah, so it's not just 'I'll be fit.' It's 'I'm waking up in my sunlit apartment in 2034, my knees don't hurt, and I'm about to go for a run by the lake.' You're creating a specific scene. Mark: Precisely. You're asking: Where am I? What do I see, hear, and smell? What’s the first thing on my mind? That vividness is what makes it a powerful tool for change, not just a wish. It forges new neural pathways, creating a 'memory of the future' that your brain can then use as a roadmap to make better decisions today.

Mark: And once you've stretched your mind with that 10-year trip, you can start seeing the present differently. You start noticing things you would have otherwise ignored. Michelle: You mean like seeing opportunities? Mark: Opportunities, yes, but also just… weird things. This brings us to one of my favorite concepts in the book, which is based on Dator's Law. It states: "Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous." Michelle: Ridiculous ideas are useful? That feels… wrong. My brain is wired to filter those out immediately to save energy. Mark: And that's the point! McGonigal argues that the feeling of 'that's absurd' is a giant, flashing sign pointing to a blind spot in your imagination. It’s a clue. She encourages us to develop "strangesight"—the ability to spot these signals of change. Michelle: Strangesight. I like that. Can you give an example? Mark: She tells a story about seeing a "No Drone Zone" sign at a park entrance. Most people would just walk past it. But her futurist brain kicked in. She asked, why is this sign here now? What does it imply about the future? It was a signal that drones were shifting from a niche hobby to a technology so common it required public regulation. That one weird sign opened up a whole world of future possibilities about privacy, surveillance, and public space. Michelle: So it's about training yourself to be curious about the oddities, to not just dismiss them. And how does this connect to empathy? That seems like a big leap. Mark: It’s the same mental muscle. McGonigal distinguishes between 'easy empathy'—feeling for someone whose experience you share—and 'hard empathy,' which is imagining a reality you've never known. To truly imagine a future where, say, private companies run nuclear disarmament, or where we have a national "Thank You Day" where everyone gets money but must gift half to an essential worker... that requires a huge imaginative leap. Michelle: It feels uncomfortable just thinking about it. Mark: Exactly. And that discomfort is the feeling of your imagination stretching. Practicing hard empathy for people in different circumstances today builds the exact same capacity you need to imagine and prepare for a radically different future. It’s cross-training for your imagination. You learn to see the world, and the future, from more than just your own point of view.

Michelle: You know, after all this, it feels like this book isn't really about predicting the future at all, is it? It's about building a more flexible, creative, and maybe even more hopeful relationship with the future. Mark: That's the heart of it. McGonigal’s goal is to cultivate what she calls "urgent optimism." The future is uncertain, and that's not a reason for anxiety, but a space for creativity. It’s a call to action. Michelle: I think a lot of people feel helpless, like the future is this giant wave that's just going to crash over us. But this approach seems to hand the surfboard back to you. Mark: That’s a perfect way to put it. The book’s ultimate message is that we all have agency. McGonigal quotes the author Tara Mohr, who says, "The world was made with a you-shaped hole in it... In that way you are called." It's about finding your unique skills and imagining how you can use them to help, to make things different. Michelle: It makes you wonder, what's one 'ridiculous' idea about the next ten years that we're all dismissing right now? What's the 'No Drone Zone' sign we're all walking past today? Mark: That's the question to sit with. And it's a powerful one. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and tell us what future you're imagining. What's your ridiculous idea? Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.