To Be… or Not To Be… a Futurist? (The Question Itself Is the Problem)

Every so often, this bit of a circular debate ignites itself.
It goes something like this:
Is it legitimate to call oneself a futurist?
Should anyone call themselves a futurist?

Some people have a fit when they hear someone use the term. Some argue over its boundaries with a kind of pedantic late-night-barroom sorta commitment. A few posture as the official arbiters of who’s allowed to use it. And every time the whole thing feels like déjà vu from a somewhat boring, less interesting universe.

To me, there are two feelings around the question/conflict/confusion/kurfuffle
/1 The fact, near as I can tell, that one can become a futurist by taking a course or getting a certification or attending a conference or joining a professional association feels… off. Like calling yourself a chef because you watched a cooking show. Or calling yourself an astronaut because you went to space camp. There’s something about the performative credentialing of futurism that feels shallow compared to the depth of a kind of consciousness and ability to sense into possible futures that I think the word should imply.

/2 That there is a flashy, self-appointed subset of people who have successfully branded themselves as futurists, sometimes but not always through a combination of savvy marketing, conference appearances, and lots of tattoos.

/3 But, here’s the last thing that in a way validates the two skepticisms I just expressed: the fact that people want to speak on the the future — the worlds to come, the possibilities ahead, the uncertainties looming — is encouraging, not discouraging. If there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s people who care about what’s next, who think seriously about how to navigate change, and who want to help others do the same.

So judging the legitimacy of futurism based on who gets to call themselves a futurist feels like a distraction from the real work of having a commitment to, you know — the future — whatever you yourself want to claim that is.

The kind of consciousness that would want to debate what it means to be a futurist feels like a kind of self-involved way of being that misses this particular point. Taking that tact divides rather than provides, like, you know — opportunities to cohere, collaborate, learn from each other, and build productive coalitions to work together not just on the problems but the mindsets and appreciation that the future is conjured through a way of seeing and knowing, not just through a set of tools, steps, credentials, or certifications.

It’s just as bad to gatekeep the term futurist as it is to inflate it through branding and self-promotion — both are signals of a weak sense of self and a lack of confidence in the actual work.

If we actually wanted to rehabilitate the word futurist, here’s a thought: start by looking at people who have never called themselves futurists but absolutely embody the essence of change-making that the word should signify.

1/ Think of Dick Fosbury, who looked at a problem everyone assumed was solved—how to clear a high bar—and asked, What if I go over it backwards? That wasn’t prediction. That was imagination turning into world-changing technique.

2/ Or Bill Bowerman, who introduced jogging in the United States at a time when the idea was so strange it was easy to imagine people mocking the very idea of running outside of the formal rituals of track and field competition, particularly at a moment when male-dominated physical fitness rituals were about the ‘He-Man’, power lifting and the like. Bowerman wasn’t forecasting a fitness revolution. He was creating it through practice.

3/ Or Alex Honnold, who saw a line up Yosemite’s El Capitan that was barely possible to free solo and then went out and did it thus expanding the frontier of human capability because he could imagine something almost no one else thought was real. By itself the feat(s) he has accomplished are a stack that runs from “mind-boggling/dangerous” to “I never would have imagined that such would be possible.”

Just a parenthetical to say that I am almost positive I watched a documentary on climbing where Lynn Hill said something in reference to Honhold’s whole penchant for free soloing that it was “futuristic” — which I took to mean that it was a kind of imagining of what could be possible that went beyond the current norms of climbing practice. If anyone knows the source for that quote, please let me know. Otherwise and in any case, that’s a vivid association and I’ll take it, even if it originated in a day-dream.

If those aren’t futurists in the sense that they saw something, or dreamed something — and then got down and did the work. If futurists’ are not applied in the sense that, say, you call yourself a futures designer but you don’t actually design anything that helps people navigate possibility — then what is the word good for?

They didn’t predict the future.

They didn’t just write a book about it.

They didn’t just talk about it.

Nor did they theorize or speculate.

They shifted it.

They materialized something new into the world.

Call them innovators, visionaries, athletes, outliers—sure.

But if we can look at their work with hindsight and say, “That changed how we live,” then the word futurist deserves to be associated with people who do, in their own domains, exactly that.

But I get it.

The skepticism around the word futurist is understandable.

Part of the skepticism around the word futurist comes from the fact that some people did successfully brand themselves into the role. They didn’t study futures, they didn’t build artifacts, they didn’t work inside organizations helping teams navigate uncertainty. They had maybe a flair for SEO, and a good sense for how to signal “I am from the future” — plentiful tattoos, slightly outrageous outfits..the whole package.

And look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with good branding. But when the branding substitutes for substance—when the optics overshadow the work—that’s as distracting and corrosive as the semantic knife-fighting about whether anyone should call themselves a futurist at all.

Both extremes by which I mean the gatekeepers who police the term and the self-appointed prophets who inflate it, well — these both pull focus away from the actual practice: helping people grapple with possibility in a grounded, material, and responsible way.

The problem isn’t the word futurist.

The problem is the noise around it.

And noise is always the enemy of signal.

What I want—what many of us want—is a futures practice defined by people who make things, not personas. People who expand what’s possible through artifacts, experiments, fieldwork, and imagination and maybe a little less through wardrobe or SEO.

If we’re going to rehabilitate the term, it won’t be through debate or policing or rebranding. It’ll be through the work—through demonstrating, again and again, what humble, disciplined, tangible futures practice looks like.

That’s the lineage worth claiming.

And the lineage worth amplifying.

Not the noise. The signal.

Maybe actually..everyone should be a futurist. Imagine if we all took an active stake in what comes next, change, and imagining the world otherwise?

Anyway. Just my two cents. Too much?