My framework for the future as a lens

Shared August 12th 2026

Updated August 13th 2026

The fixed future fallacy

When a lot of us think about the future, we think about it as if it were a fixed destination. When we think of whatever future year relative to today (2026), whether it's 2030, 2035, 2040, 2050, 2075, 2100, or whenever, We think of a high-tech utopian society or a cyberpunk dystopian one most of the time, or often, an in-between state.
Regardless of how you imagine it, we usually think of the future as a destination to be reached. We read articles or blogs like "Here's what 2050 is gonna look like", and it usually treats it as a finished state with lots of cool-sounding technologies and a seemingly "solved" society, or a society in disarray extrapolated from today's problems, or often, a blend of the two, one with many current problems solved, but also a few problems that aren't solved alongside some new ones.
From my perspective however, I don't believe in fixed destination futures at all. History has never worked that way before. It always fluctuates and ebbs and swings from high and lows all the time like a chaotic pendulum.
You can read a "Here's what 2050 will be like" blog post or article, it envisions a society with a lot of white buildings and plants on the side with holograms everywhere, and a lot of other cool-sounding technologies, apply that vision as if the West would look like that everywhere, and go "cool vision, thx". What happens to that society in 2051? 2055? 2060? 2075? 2100? 2133?. That's not how it works. You could also do something similar for "What 2100 is going to be like", and it envisions a doom-and-gloom collapse scenario with cyberpunk aesthetics and corporate control, and go "Gee, that's rough". What happens in 2101? 2105? 2110? 2125? 2150? 2186?

That's the hole I'm pointing at. Time doesn't magically stop at 2050 or 2100 or whatever future year you're imagining. Lots of people in the 20th century have also imagined the year 2000 as a fixed destination when they thought of the future, but now we're in 2026, and the world kept on moving past 2000.
I'm giving it a name. I'm gonna call it "fixed future fallacy", stating that we imagine the future as a fixed destination to be reached, when that "destination" never comes at all, or if parts of it do become a thing, it's just one chapter in the history books. I'm aware of the "arrival fallacy", stating that if you achieve a goal in life, you'll achieve lifelong happiness, when it's actually a temporary feeling, but that's much more of a psychology thing than a futurism thing, but is similarly paralleled to futurism.
2050 is really just one stretch of time from January 2050 through December 2050 that flows into 2051 and beyond. Same logic for any year in general.

The "Then what?" / "What's next?" consequence recursion loop

Now for the core on how I imagine the future. I recursively ask "then what?" or "what's next" over and over again on today's ongoing problems and solutions and effectively trace it through and through until I eventually become so detached from the present it feels almost alien.
In relation to the fixed future fallacy, most of us also imagine the first-order consequence of some kind of event, sometimes the second-order, and rarely, third-order consequence, but that's about it. When I try to write future timelines, I go much further. I imagine not just the first and second order consequences, I recursively ask "Then what?" over and over again. I go to the third order consequence, then 4th order, then 5th, 6th, 7th, and by the time I get to the 10th+ order consequence in 2075 or 2100 or whatever, I'm completely detached from 2026 problems because the 10th order consequence of today's actions will be what people in 2075 are going to deal with, and similarly, the 10th order consequence of actions in 2075 will be dealt with in 2130 or 2150 or whatever, which will also feel alien even from a 2075 perspective.
It's like being on a boat surfing a branching river and the boat just chooses a branch based on vibes. In 2026, we're in one environment, but by 2040, we're in a new environment based on where the river took us, and by 2060, we're in a totally new environment, and so on, and it's all downstream of where we were in 2026.
Let's take climate change for example, arguably one of the biggest problems facing today's society. A lot of us imagine linear doom-and-gloom collapse scenarios. We imagine that climate change will get worse, which will lead to the polar ice caps being ice-free during summer, ecosystems collapsing, agriculture being impossible, wildfires being everywhere, wet-bulb heatwaves, water crises and possible water wars, and eventual collapse. We imagine maybe the second-order consequence of that. If wet-bulb heatwaves are everywhere, then heat deaths will surge. If agriculture is impossible, we'll starve. Thus, collapse. I don't see it that way at all.
Now for my consequence chain on climate change with "Then what?" being an engine.
Climate change gets worse (2020s-2030s seed, then what?) → Water crises (1st order, 2035, then what?) → AWEs get cheap from innovation pressure, water crisis averted! (2nd order, 2039, then what?) → They suck up the humidity in the air once scaled to infrastructure level for another 10 years in various cities and also reduce wet-bulb heatwaves (3rd order, 2049, then what?) → Humidity collapse panic in cities because low humidity = high temperature swings = concrete buildings crack = higher urban wildfire risks in green areas (4th order, 2055)
That's a 4th order problem from today's climate change fears. One problem gets solved (AWEs solve the water crisis in the 2040s and reduce wet-bulb heatwaves), but creates a new problem (AWEs suck up too much humidity, leading to wider temperature swings, and cracking concrete buildings and higher wildfire risks). Also, I don't just stop there. I can keep on going.
Humidity collapse leads to "humidity glue" being a solution to it to fill in building cracks (5th order, 2066, then what?) → It scales but then South Africa has a monopoly on it (6th order, 2072, then what?) → Geopolitical turmoil over humidity glue monopolies (7th order, 2076...). By this point, geopolitical conflicts over humidity glue in 2076 is way more detached from the original climate change in 2026. I could keep going, but I'll stop here so it doesn't go infinite. You could continue that and go to 10th order and beyond if you'd like!

Butterfly effects

Aside from recursive "What's next" thinking chains, I also use butterfly effects as the lens at which I view and write about the future.
The most famous example is the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand after the car he was on took a wrong turn to the assassin's path. That one wrong car turn then led to the chain of events that led to WWI, and completely changed the course of history. Someone in 1900 would look at 1910 and think it looks fairly familiar, but a 1910 person looking at 1920 would feel disorientated because of the aftermath of WWI. No WWI means no WWII, no Cold War, and pretty much a completely different history trajectory.
Another more recent example is COVID. That one sweatshop in Wuhan, China, originating from a bat sometime in November 2019 with its first cases in December 2019, spiraled out into a full blown pandemic in March 2020 that broke the economy, caused a mass health panic, contributed to political division, and completely changed the course of the rest of the 2020s. It was a black swan event that couldn't have been predicted easily.
Now I apply that same butterfly effect logic for the future. Similar chains, but make them from unexpected angles.
Now here's an example:
An obscure law passed in 2031 influences a politician in 2034, which influences that nation's politics in 2036, which changes geopolitics in 2039, which births geopolitical bottlenecks in 2042, which births unseen new tech in 2045 from innovation pressure, which spirals in 2048, which kills an industry in 2050, which leads to job losses and cultural reactions to that industry's decline in 2051, which influences a cultural movement in 2055, etc.
If it weren't for that 2031 law, that industry in 2050 wouldn't be in a dying state.

Radical interconnectedness and knot structures

As you ask "then what?" over and over again with a given seed, naturally, you're gonna come up with multiple branches and threads. That's the emergent structure.
When you have multiple threads, assume that everything is connected in some way or another, even if it's two topics that are seemingly isolated. Assume that nothing is ever in a vacuum.
For example, climate change could be indirectly related to the AI singularity. The most obvious link is that AI suggests solutions to climate change. A more indirect one is, climate change makes it more difficult for workers to mine the resources because of worse weather, which means fewer of those resources making its way to fabs, which means less compute, which means more compute constraints for the AI. Those constrains could then lead to its own web of consequences.
Also assume a network structure whose intersections are knots. Every event or technology or whatever (a seed knot) is related to other things (first-order knots), which is themselves related to other things (second-order knots), and by the 10th order, you're in a totally different place compared to the first knot.
When making predictions, use current day events and some of your other predictions that ties them all together, identify which areas are related to each other and the dynamics around that, and so on. Take in the big picture.
One example is say, AI. What areas does AI intersect with as of August 2026? Creativity, healthcare, data centers, training data, coding. What are those areas intersected with?
For creativity, it's culture, art, writing, and a lot more. For healthcare, it's the healthcare system but also skin health, heart health, brain health, anatomy in general, biology. For data centers, it's political pushback against them, electricity bottlenecks, silicon chips, Taiwan's fab monopoly, NVIDIA chips, financial incentives, construction jobs, and electricity generation. For training data, it's information, the internet, scraping controversies, distillation, how the model behaves, open source vs closed source. For programming, it's coding speeds, debugging troubles, software architectures, spaghetti code, code maintenance, cybersecurity.
Now combine these first and second-order "knots" into new knots! Heart health + Healthcare system + Construction jobs = Possible unionization over someone having a heart attack mid-job. Electricity bottlenecks + Distillation = Cheap alternative to training a big model. Silicon chips + Culture + Scraping controversies = "Someone makes chips specifically for an AI to scrape the internet, and the internet is mad about it". Data centers + Brain health + Taiwan's fab monopoly = "Data centers are breaking your mental health, but it all hinges on Taiwan's chip factories".
Now those knots could also have their own butterfly effects or 10th+ order consequences or be merged with other knots that themselves have consequence webs, and sooner or later, you'd end up somewhere you'd never anticipate.
That's where nearly all the novelty lives. It comes from the intersections between knots, not purely original things.

Desynchronization and different rates of change

With all that interconnectedness, they won't connect at the same speed. AI is moving fast, and in 2026, we're already seeing the 4th order consequence of ChatGPT's launch. Here's the simplified chain:
The launch makes headlines and is a cultural event (2022 seed) → AI boom as FOMO, wanting to be the next ChatGPT (1st order 2023) → NVIDIA becomes valuable for its chips to train AIs (2nd order 2024) → Data centers are the hot new commodity stashed with NVIDIA chips (3rd order 2025) → RAM, GPU, and many computer part prices are sky high because data centers are eating up supply and the power grid is strained (4th order 2026). That rate of change could accelerate and by 2035, we'd probably be living in the 20th order consequence of ChatGPT's launch that themselves got tangled in the web with other technologies over and over again at breakneck speed.
Infrastructure however, moves at a generally snails pace compared to AI and the newest tech. Similar thing for institutions and governments. A law passed in 2025 for instance, might see its first order consequences being visible in 2026 or even the same year, but the second order ones might not be visible until 2031, the third order not until 2036, and so on. Infrastructure buildouts, assuming a 2026 completion, might see its first order consequence fairly quickly, but the second order ones might not take until 2033 to crystalize, and the third order until 2040, all while the tech moves at blazing speed.
Various things move at different speeds. Tech moves fast, humans move at human speed, but infrastructure and governments move slowly. Governments in 2040 might try to regulate a technology based on what they know about it in 2038, which is already outdated by 2043. That friction between different speeds creates a vacuum, which gets filled by certain players, which creates its own tensions and butterfly effects and river branches and knots that themselves have their own consequences that can briefly change the speed of something. It's a fractal all the way down.
Here's one example, with a chain for simplicity:
The AI singularity is achieved and a lot of us freak out (2028 seed) → It comes up with a cure for breast cancer with a 75% success rate in hours → (1st order, May 2029) → The FDA needs a decade to approve the breast cancer cure (2nd order, Jan 2030) → A flood of AI generated cancer cures for different cancers, generated over hours or days, remain unapproved with no action (3rd order, Sep 2030) → Government receives pressure to speed up FDA approvals (4th order, Mar 2031) → They speed it up, but it's still 2 years → (5th order, Nov 2031) → An AI generated experimental breast cancer cure gets life-altering side effects on some 40 year old woman because the training data didn't include her demographic → (6th order, Jan 2032) → Government slows it back down to 10 year approval processes (7th order, Feb 2032) → Backlash amongst accelerationists and young people (8th order Mar 2032) → Thousands of AI generated cancer cures, with dozens of skin cancer cures with a 93% success rate generated in early 2032 while the FDA is approving one AI-generated cure at 64% success rate generated in June 2030 that won't be FDA approved until 2038 while more people keep dying from cancer (9th order, Jul 2032).

In 2038, AI could generate a million cancer cures targeting different types, and generate one cure per hour, but we still need to physically create the cures the AI suggested, and scale them to all the hospitals, and the government is still approving a few cures from 2032 while the latest ones in 2038 have even higher success rates and even fewer side effects. 99% of them will just be ideas floating in a data center or someone's hard drive somewhere. Now apply this to infrastructure. AI suggests a plan for overhauling the power grid in 2030, but it needs 15 years to overhaul it nationally and it needs workers, and by 2045, millions of new AI-generated suggestions for the power grid have popped up taking into consideration the latest tech from the late 2030s and early 2040s, while the 2030 one is already dated, even while robots came into the picture in 2036 creating its own tensions and messiness in between! It could generate the optimally best city layout for a suburb in 2031, but it needs a year or two to construct it, but wait, now you're dealing with NIMBY battles and local urban approval, adding another 4 years before construction even starts in 2035, and changing a few elements the AI suggested. It finishes by 2037, but by then, it came up with new angles and an even better city plan based on the latest tech.
That's the tension I'm getting at here. The tension between fast tech accelerating faster and faster at exponential speeds, and slow governments responses moving as fast as they did in 2000.
It's like swatting a fly. We try to swat it (governments) with regulations, but the fly (the tech) keeps on moving at an accelerating pace and makes more flies that themselves move fast. The frustration of being unable to swat the fly is where the real story lives.

Embrace the mess and never assume uniformity

As you develop these predictions, it will naturally be a mess. That's the point. That's how the real world works.
At the same time, take into consideration all the nuance. For example, the older generation gravitates to the status quo more than young people. Men will value different things compared to women. Someone living in China might prefer centralized government decisions compared to the US. One government might value a federalism structure more than a unicameral one. Actions will always have a mixed perception, regardless whether 56% approve of it, it's as high as 96%, or as low as 8%, but even with said approvals, there's also nuance there, which then becomes their own point of tension as they develop and ebb and flow throughout the timeline.
As to what that future will be like? It'll also be layered, and it always will be. 2050 won't look like 2050 in uniform. It'll look like 2049 neural helmets, a 2042 cultural trend that got revived, a smartphone from 2045, 2036 AR glasses, open-weight AI models from 2032 and 2029 and 2025, whilst you live in a house built in 2012, riding an autonomous vehicle made in 2038 on a road constructed in 2002, heading for a bridge constructed in 1980 with a mix of human-driven gas cars from 2029, electric cars from 2033, solar-skinned electric cars from 2038, and autonomous vehicles from the mid 2030s through today, with the occasional old car from 2009 and even 1996 cruising alone, listening to music made in 2033 whose artist started her musical career in 2023, which coexists with AI-assisted music from 2027, all while stopping by a walkable island built in 2044 with tram tracks and a tram also built in 2044. You get the idea. It's a layered strata of every era!
Simulaneously, the future won't be one thing, but multiple things depending on the part of the world you're in. 2050 in NYC won't look like 2050 in Beijing, which doesn't look like 2050 in Addis Ababa, or 2050 in Buenos Aires, or 2050 in Brussels, 2050 Sydney, 2050 Mexico City, Mumbai, Moscow, Lagos, and so on because of all the different cultures that themselves might change based on the interconnecting consequence web.

The only things that won't change

Amidst all this, there are some things that will never change.
The laws of physics for example, will always be the same everywhere you go in the universe, anytime. Gravity will always pull, the speed of light will still be the speed limit of the universe, aerodynamics will stay aerodynamics, 1 + 1 will always equal 2, heat transfer mechanisms will stay as is, quantum mechanics will still abide to their rules, matter and antimatter put together will still release an enormous amount of energy, and mass can always be converted to energy.
General messiness is also never going to change either. The real world will always be messy and complicated, regardless of whether you're talking about human societal dynamics or multi-body problems.
Entropy will always catch on. Things will decay at roughly the same rate. It will still be the reason why a lot of infrastructure has a lifespan. It will still march on. A house built in 2025 will still feel new in 2030, but in 2060, it'll feel a little worn down, but by 2100, that house is 75 years old and needs to be repaired.
Human psychology is also unlikely to change as well, likely not for thousands of years from an evolutionary perspective. We're still gonna complain about ordinary human problems. We're still gonna be tribal apes. We're still gonna feel the same set of emotions (i.e. anger, fear, wonder, joy, surprise, sadness, anxiety, inspiration, grief, boredom, etc.) We're still gonna fear the unknown. We're still gonna simplify complex things. Unless we genetically edit ourselves to fundamentally have a different psychology, this won't change, but even if that happens, that still runs right back into the messiness and nuance rules and the portion of the population who has baseline psychology.

The summary

What fields might it resemble?

My best description is that this is a merger of complexity theory, systems thinking, history, and physics, while being futurism-centric.

How might I distill my way of thinking into a byte-sized piece?

The question "Then what?" or "What comes next?" is the engine of it all. You could ask that question recursively forever and ever.
As you ask that question, a web structure will emerge, not a linear chain of events.
Use the butterfly effect as the lens to view the timeline. Any obscure decision made in 2029 could spiral into something massive by 2036 and be its own knot for example.
Different things move at different speeds. Tech will move at exponential speeds, but humans move at human speeds, and infrastructure and institutions will move slowly. Use that tension to create more knots.
Everything else (i.e. exponential tech growth, geopolitical dynamics, niche research), is simply content to that engine.
The only thing that will never change is the laws of physics and general real world messiness.
And lastly, combine two or more things into something unexpected, and see how it turns out.

How this could be useful

With this framework, I find it useful in other ways. I'm someone who generally sick and tired of doom-bait on social media, but this framing pretty much dissolves it. No more doom-and-gloom collapse scenarios ending at the worst possible moment, without recursively asking "and then what?". On the opposite extreme, there's also hopium, claiming that after this rough period, a paradise is on the horizon and we'll be there forever, but they ask what happens after the paradise phase.
I don't see this being useful for predicting the future with 100% accuracy, because let's be real, that's impossible, but as a lens? Totally valuable for systems thinking! I just wanted to write down this framework because I don't know of any other people or social media profiles, even in futurism circles, who thinks of the future like this, especially for someone my age (writing this at 22 btw).
For other creative projects that don't relate to predicting future timelines, it could also be great for that.
As an online BS detector? That's basically part of the reason why it developed the way it is. I watch a YouTube video, it's all doom-baity, and this framework immediately sets off my BS detector.
For futurism itself, it's a middle ground between doom-bait and hopium-bait (opposite extremes, but both fall for the fixed future fallacy), a thoughtful and structured middle ground that just, lets the future get messy instead of trying to predict the future with accuracy!
As for how long it takes to predict all that, it took me around 30 minutes to go from climate change (seed) to "humidity glue geopolitical turmoil over South Africa's monopoly" (7th order), and writing them all down. Want me to predict the 50th order consequence of today's tech through 2070? That'll take me several hours to do, but the 6th order for today's government actions by 2070? That'll take more like 20 minutes. You need to think about the consequence web bit by bit before you get there. AI could definitely help with unexpected angles you'd never consider and fleshing out other predictions, but the structure still needs to be there and you still need to do the thinking yourself before using AI if you choose to use it!