The Future

At the end of last year Ipsos Mackay published a report on consumers’ attitudes to the future.

Man, was it bleak!

Hardly anyone, regardless of age, gender or background, thought the future would be better than the past.

Here are some of the comments that were made in the fieldwork for that report:

“The boat people coming in. If they start coming, they’ll swamp us.”

“Crime is going to get worse.”

“The gap between rich and poor will get a lot worse and not just other countries, here in Australia too.”

“That’s how the future is going. American culture is going to dominate everything.”

“We won’t have the services. No enough people paying tax.”

“In ten years we’ll be like London. You have to be scared of ten year olds in London.”

“Our stimulation levels will get more and more elevated. Something will have to be really big to get people’s attention.”

And this is just a taste of all the terrible things awaiting us in the future, according to the participants in this study.

At the end of the fieldwork, the team wondered what was causing people to feel so despondent about the future. As someone currently reading a lot of Australian history, there are many ways we are now better off than we were, say, fifty years ago (let alone a hundred years which is not long in the scheme of things). Are we hard-wired to be nostalgic about the past? Are we bracing ourselves for an unknown future by being deliberately pessimistic? Or is this pessimism merely a symptom of our lack of faith in our leaders to adequately address the problems of today, let alone tomorrow? All three probably and one of the consistent themes in our research over the last two years has been consumer anger about short-term thinking in government and corporate life.

You can hear me discussing this report with the lovely Antony Funnell from Radio National’s Future Tense program:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2010/2811132.htm

More information can be found about The Future here:

http://www.ipsos.com.au/knowledgecentre/news/100128.aspx

There is one quote that never made it into the report, which I just love. The young man responsible said this in the context of a broader discussion about the impact of technology on our ethical behaviour.

“I have more faith in humanity to believe that internet porn will lead to a decline in personal integrity.”