A Future To Look Forward To

In his famous Kenyon College commencement address, David Foster Wallace told a story about two young fish swimming along when an older fish passes by and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

We are those young fish. The water we swim in is the linear economy—an integrated system of fashion-as-novelty, planned obsolescence, and extractive capitalism so pervasive we hardly notice it exists.

Each element reinforces the others in a loop of exploitation: our craving for beauty, our bias toward change, our confusion of temporary satisfaction with progress.

As Bill McKibben observed in 2023, in 100 years humans probably won’t be “amusing themselves by consuming immense amounts of stuff.” But in seven years—within the critical climate decade—we almost certainly still will be.

That remark was intended as a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming challenges. Yet two years on, it’s clear that biasing against long-term change for the sake of short-term targets is proving counterproductive. We need a wider view.

It’s time to take a look at the water we swim in—and imagine life outside the fishbowl. The real question is whether that transition will feel like liberation or coercion.

The Water We're Swimming In

The psychological reality of this moment is sobering. Broadly speaking, we’re not well. We’re drowning in information, much of it false, and carrying anxieties our predecessors rarely faced:

• Will our children be better off than us?
• Will the animals we grew up with vanish within our lifetimes?
• Will countries on the maps we learned in school soon be underwater?
• Will democracy endure?
• Will human intelligence remain dominant?

These fears compound because our economic system offers no path to security. Fashion-as-novelty equates beauty with churn. Planned obsolescence makes durability feel like stagnation. Extractive capitalism monetizes both by turning fleeting satisfaction into the illusion of progress.

Together they form a doom spiral: novelty drives obsolescence, obsolescence drives consumption, consumption funds more novelty. Each protects the others from critique, leaving us psychologically trapped.

Building a better future can provide relief today while securing what we care about tomorrow. But that future must feel richer, safer, and more comfortable—not like a diminished version of the present.

The Core Promise: More, Not Less

The circular economy’s breakthrough is decoupling value creation from resource extraction. When companies profit by adding value rather than producing volume, everyone gains: businesses through deeper customer relationships, customers through better experiences, and society through regenerative growth.

• Riversimple designs cars for all drivers across a vehicle’s life, capturing more value from the same materials.
• Apple extends device lifecycles through software, strengthening loyalty while lowering costs.
• Patagonia repairs rather than replaces gear, building brand love that commands premium pricing.

Consider two phones. One: a Bell System rotary, built in the 1950s, still working today—indestructible, repairable, iconic. Its value was defined as part of a service. The other: a plastic football-shaped novelty phone, given away with a magazine subscription in the 1980s. That phone is now landfill. Only the Bell phone endures.

The difference lies in paradigms of value creation. Many of us have lived in both. One was objectively better for human flourishing.

Outside the fishbowl lies a source of competitive advantage that also aligns with planetary boundaries. We’re not asking people to accept less—we’re offering more.

Vignette 1: Calm Permanence

The Trap You Know:
Your closet overflows with clothes you don’t love. Each seemed right in the store—the color was trending, the cut was current, the price felt like victory. But at home, surrounded by last season’s mistakes, nothing coordinates. Getting dressed becomes a daily reminder of poor decisions disguised as self-expression. “Retail therapy” promises relief but delivers more confusion.

The psychology is exhausting: constant evaluation, comparison, disposal. Marie Kondo’s idea of items “sparking joy” feels impossible when everything was designed to spark desire instead. Accumulation never resolves into satisfaction because the system isn’t designed for satisfaction—it’s designed for repetition.

The Liberation You Gain:
Your closet contains only pieces that spark joy. Not because you’ve become a minimalist, but because each item was designed to last decades and evolve with you. Brands thrive through stewardship—alterations, repairs, seasonal swaps, gradual upgrades.

Each morning feels like curating an art collection rather than managing inventory. Coherence replaces churn. When you want change, you adapt what you have rather than chase what you lack.

The shift is profound: from managing stuff to living with systems. Retail therapy becomes obsolete not through discipline but through irrelevance. Possessions appreciate rather than depreciate. Brand relationships deepen rather than fragment. Why chase fleeting desire when you already live with enduring beauty?

This is the serenity of good home economics.

Vignette 2: Mainstreaming Couture

The Trap You Know:
Your three-year-old car is showing wear. The interior is scuffed, the tech outdated, the warranty expired. Fixing costs more than the car’s value justifies. You’re trapped between maintaining a depreciating asset or replacing it with another.

This is fashion-as-novelty applied to everything: products designed for first impressions, not lasting relationships. Value peaks at purchase, then declines toward replacement.

The Liberation You Gain:
You access mobility as a service designed for decades. Upholstery refresh? The local atelier treats it as art, not repair. Tech upgrades integrate seamlessly, no wholesale replacement needed.

The artisans who customize your car are stars—the Hermès craftspeople of mobility. Their work commands respect because they optimize for decades of value. You enjoy luxury-level care at accessible prices. Your provider profits by keeping you satisfied, not by selling replacements.

Fashion shifts from novelty-chasing to skill-celebrating. This isn’t “making do with less”—it’s having more: more craftsmanship, more customization, more relationship.

The pendulum swings from fast fashion to couture at scale.

Vignette 3: Playfulness and Exploration

The Trap You Know:
Your home feels like a museum of incompatible decisions. The smart TV doesn’t talk to the sound system. The coffee maker uses filters you can’t find. The exercise bike runs on a discontinued app. Each choice made sense in isolation, but together they create friction.

Clay Christensen’s Modularity Theory explains why: when companies prioritize product differentiation over ecosystem curation, they create incompatibility that locks customers into narrow upgrade paths. Innovation devolves into forcing choices instead of enabling creativity.

The Liberation You Gain:
Your home works like LEGO—standardized components, infinite recombination. Sound, lighting, appliances, furniture: common protocols, seamless upgrades.

Standardization becomes appealing because it enables creativity. Each element works alone but together forms a symphony. Investments compound rather than compete. Manufacturers profit by ensuring harmony, not by trapping customers.

Modularity expands play beyond computers into everyday life. Nothing permanently breaks, everything can be reconfigured. The psychological effect is like childhood play: safe boundaries encourage exploration.

This is an ecosystem big enough to live in.

The 1939 Precedent

Think this future sounds strange? Visitors to the 1939 World’s Fair, in the depths of the Depression, for the first time saw television, air conditioning, superhighways, suburban living—technologies that defined the next 40 years.

They seemed impossibly futuristic. Yet within a generation, they became ordinary. Companies like General Motors, GE, and Westinghouse earned prosperity by creating the infrastructure people came to depend on.

Circular innovators today face a similar moment. They are building systems future generations will call normal. The opportunity for cultural leadership is immense.

The Instructional Challenge

These vignettes are examples of instructional design at civilizational scale. Just as LEGO teaches children to build through play, circular solutions will teach adults to flourish through permanence.

The obstacle is what behavioral economists call “loss aversion.” People fear losing familiar freedoms—the freedom to buy, discard, replace—without recognizing those freedoms are obligations. Fashion cycles feel compulsory. Upgrade paths feel extractive. Subscriptions feel exploitative.

But these aren’t real freedoms when they produce anxiety instead of satisfaction. The linear system exploits survival-era cognitive biases—instincts shaped for an age of scarcity, now manipulated to keep us consuming in an era of abundance.

Circular transformation succeeds when it shows that constraints are not constraints at all. Standardization enables creativity. Permanence enables beauty. Stewardship enables relationship.

The contrast between the Bell phone and the football phone makes this plain. We’re not asking people to accept worse—we’re offering better, which happens to align with planetary boundaries.

Why the System Protects Itself

Novelty, obsolescence, and extractive capitalism reinforce one another with formidable defenses:

• Challenge obsolescence, and defenders invoke creative destruction.
• Challenge fashion cycles, and they invoke freedom of expression.
• Challenge overproduction, and they invoke job creation.

These arguments only work while the elements remain bound together. Circular transformation unravels the system by offering innovation without destruction, expression without waste, prosperity without depletion. Once better alternatives exist, the defenses collapse.

This is why circular change must be systemic, not incremental. You can’t solve obsolescence without addressing fashion cycles. You can’t solve fashion cycles without addressing growth models. And you can’t solve growth models without rethinking all three together.

The psychological lock is just as strong. When consumption patterns merge with identity, questioning the system feels like questioning the self. The linear economy exploits belonging and meaning as well as desire.

Breaking this requires offering identity upgrades, not sacrifices. The circular future must provide more meaning, more belonging, more expression than the linear present.

The Cultural Opportunity

Repair becomes artisanal. Maintenance becomes meaningful. Permanence becomes playful. Material culture shifts.

This “systemic beauty” framework appeals to humanity’s need for both harmony (systems that work together) and elegance (systems that teach themselves). Current consumer culture delivers neither. It is chaotic by design, meant to confuse.

Circular systems, well-designed, deliver coherence and serenity. They nurture competence, mastery, creativity. People feel empowered rather than overwhelmed. Isn’t that what luxury marketing has always promised?

The cultural shift toward artisanship, permanence, and relationship generates what economists call positive externalities. When your neighbor repairs instead of replaces, the repair ecosystem strengthens for all. When communities embrace permanence, cultural stability grows and anxiety shrinks.

When it comes to externalities, circularity reduces the negatives and multiplies the positives. Imagine what that means at scale.

The Wealth Creation Mechanism

Here’s the paradox: making more value creates more wealth than making more products.

Linear models peak at purchase. Everything afterward is cost. Loyalty depends on repeat transactions.

Circular models invert the dynamic. The first transaction begins a relationship. Every interaction adds value. Loyalty grows with service depth rather than purchase frequency.

The math is simple: a customer worth $100 per transaction becomes worth $1000+ over decades when you optimize for lifetime value. But this requires integration capabilities most linear firms lack.

This is why circular transformation creates lasting competitive advantage. It taps value that linear models cannot reach.

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