Nate Hagens

I had been somewhere else.

I had been specifically in late 2026.

I'd been imagining a scenario about diesel rationing due to refinery constraints.

My coffee was gone and the beautiful morning dawn light was gone.

And the Baltimore Oreo that comes this time of year to eat the oranges I put out had come and gone.

And I'd been 10 feet away and somewhere else entirely.

So today I want to talk about presence, about actually being here in the now.

as a specific problem for those of us who have spent years building an intellectual synthesis about where this civilization is going.

Because the work that has made me useful, I think, in some small way has also made me peculiarly absent from my own life.

And I would bet I'm not alone in this.

I have lived this kind of absence for a long time.

You could say I have had a front row seat to this particular cost.

And the work that I do has depended on it.

It's probably cost me more than I have recognized until recently, and I'll come back to that later.

Nate Hagenshaw, When you spend 20 years modeling futures,

Your mind develops habits and it drifts forward in time.

And my brain runs scenarios when it has nothing else to do.

It runs scenarios when it does have something else to do.

It runs them while you're eating, while you're on a hike, while you're watching the dawn light come up.

And the habit is probably what has allowed this work.