David McElroy

Do you ever watch videos from high-tech companies that are supposed to show off what they’re going to bring you in a few years? I watch them, but I know better than to believe they represent reality. It’s dangerous to try to live in the future instead of the present, whether you’re a company or an individual.

Microsoft has a new video out showing us what it expects the office of tomorrow to look like. To me, it just looks like something put together by an art director for an especially sterile and boring science fiction movie. It’s vaguely interesting if you’re into technology, but the track record of this sort of future-looking prediction isn’t good. (If you want a real laugh, check out what a technical magazine predicted in 1968 as life in the year 2008.)

It’s not just Microsoft that makes this sort of thing. I remember a similarly laughable video made by Nokia in 2009, and since Nokia is now fighting for its life two years later, it seems unlikely that the company still plans to pursue those fantasies. Way back in 1987, Apple made a similar forward-looking video based on the vision of then-CEO John Sculley (a couple of years after he pushed Steve Jobs out of the company).

So why am I so disdainful of this sort of video? Is it just because they tend to get things so wrong about the future? No, that’s not it at all. It’s true that the future never looks quite like what the futurists predict, but the real problem is that focusing so much on way down the road — and talking to the public about what’s down the road — does absolutely nothing to sell products today.

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For reasons that will never make sense to me, many on the political left don’t like leaders. What’s more, many of them go so far as to say that their groups don’t even have leaders. The various “Occupy” groups around the country claim that they make decisions by consensus and that none of the groups has leaders.

I don’t know whether they actually believe this, but I do know it’s not true. Unless you have a very limited variety of people, opinions are going to diverge quickly in any group. When a group is new and goals are fuzzy and everybody is happy with everybody, consensus might be easy. Pretty quickly, though, things can turn ugly. For instance:

• At the original Occupy group — the one on Wall Street — the issue has become drums. That’s right, drums. Some of the protesters have brought in drums and beat on them incessantly. It attracts attention, but it would get irritating very, very quickly. (Here’s a short video to give you an idea of what it’s like.) Because it was annoying so many people (and preventing some protesters from sleeping and preventing kids from studying at a nearby school), the group decided — allegedly by consensus — to limit drumming to two hours a day. However, if you read the details, the people who wanted unlimited drumming say they were prevented from bringing up their own proposal. That’s clearly not consensus. It’s clearly a matter of the majority forcing its will on the nuts who wanted to beat on drums all day. (I have no sympathy with the drummers, but the actions make it clear that “consensus” is a lie.)

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There were two brothers who grew up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father who terrorized the family as they were growing up. The father was physically and emotionally abusive, and it was worse when he was drinking. What do you figure happened to the brothers?

One of the boys grew up to become an abusive alcoholic who created another dysfunctional family. The other brother became very successful and had a loving, stable family. Each brother was later asked why he had become what he was. The alcoholic brother said, “What else would you expect me to be? I grew up watching what my father was and how he treated all of us. Wouldn’t you expect me to start drinking and become what I am?”

About himself, the successful brother said, “What else would you expect me to be? I grew up watching what my father was and how he treated all of us. Wouldn’t you expect me to become just the opposite of what I saw in him?”

The story is apocryphal, but it makes a very true point. You can’t control the facts of your life, but your interpretation of what happens is up to you. The facts aren’t always as important as the narrative you end up believing. In the story, both brothers had the same facts, but their narratives about what happened drove them to opposite kinds of lives. If you’re not happy with the life you have right now, you might or might not be able to immediately change the facts — but you can change the narrative immediately.

I started thinking about this today because of a conversation I had with a stranger a couple of days ago. He’s only 34 years old, but he considers himself a failure. He had big hopes for himself when he was younger. He married the girl of his dreams shortly after she finished law school. He started a business that he thought would one day make him wealthy and secure. He and his wife bought a house in a nice neighborhood with good schools for their future kids to attend. He was set for the future. Or so he thought.

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