From the first time someone asks you, as a child, what you want to be when you grow up, to last week when someone asks where you see yourself in five years, the answer tends to be the same: “I don't know.” Lucky are the few people who escape that low hum of dread and anticipation, usually both at once.

And it isn't only the personal kind. Think climate or politics. And crowning it is the Doomsday Clock, which this January ticked to 85 seconds from midnight — the closest the atomic scientists have ever dared set it. (Sorry. Did we say this one would be cheerful?)

So how do you climb out of the hole that just a bit of overthinking keeps digging deeper? We're not sure either. All we can say with certainty is that it is too late to be just pessimistic. But debating, talking and imagining what's ahead, its alternatives and its risks, is a decent way to get comfortable with not knowing the unknowable. As Socrates more or less had it: you come to know exactly how much you know… Which, at the end of the day, is nothing. A humbling moment 😘

💭 Philosophical Concept of the Month

Sometimes a little philosophical grounding helps, and there's no shortage of philosophers willing to weigh in on the future. One who keeps coming up: Mark Fisher, and the "slow cancellation of the future" - the idea that our current cultural and artistic output isn't truly new so much as a quiet reshuffling of elements, styles and references that already belong to the past, ones we've simply forgotten. Which leads to the age-old question: has all the art already been made?

🔬 Scientific Discovery of the Month

Not a discovery made in the future. More like the discovery of the future itself - the nuance is subtle, but bear with us. Researchers at ETH Zürich have produced perfect randomness through quantum physics: an experiment generating numbers whose outcome is genuinely impossible to predict, and so belongs to the future and the future only. One of those rare moments when we regret doodling through physics class.

📖 Library of the Month

A thousand trees have been planted outside Oslo, with a purpose. This is the Future Library, led by artist Katie Paterson: every year a different writer (Ocean Vuong, Margaret Atwood and Karl Ove Knausgaard among them) submits a manuscript, locked away until 2114, when the by-then forest will supply the paper to print all one hundred books written from 2014 onward. Talk about playing the long game. (Watch the video here!)

🏙️ Installation of the Month

We have a soft spot for street art installations. After all, that’s how we got started. In a similar vein, we came across The Atlas of Tomorrow, an interactive mural in Philadelphia by artist Candy Chang. Passersby spin a dial to land on one of 64 fables from the I Ching, offered as poetic guidance for whatever they're trying to figure out.

🏛️ Museum of the Month

Few places are as suited to host a "Museum of the Future" as Dubai. A seven-floor building inaugurated in 2022, it carries visitors on a journey to the year 2071, an immersive look at the scientific, technological, cultural and social ideas that might, or might not, greet us ahead. Oh, and yours truly has also built two installations for the “Tomorrow Today” exhibition of the museum - read more about them here!

🪞 You of the Month

A faintly questionable spin on "writing a letter to your future self": we came across Future You, a project from the MIT Media Lab, where you hold a conversation with an AI-generated older version of yourself, assembled from your data and a short questionnaire. Dystopian, or a useful tool for reflecting and reconnecting with oneself? Probably a bit of both.

And that's June (2026) for you. We’ll leave you with some words from Ursula K. Le Guin, one last little bit for the dread, though. While accepting a medal in 2014, she said: 

— Best guesses at what the years might hold, 

From the usual suspects, doing as they're told xx