This morning I read an interview with the futurist Brian David Johnson and he said, “The future is intensely local.”

One of his points is that we need to understand that we build our futures and that we have a lot of control over our role in this process. We aim our focus. We get to decide how we use technology so it is not using us. We can work backward from a version of where we want to end up. We plan what we want to work toward and how our future will look.

Too often, I think, we are transfixed by the big news, the faraway crisis, or the complex numbers on a stock index lurching up or down. Knowing what happens is one thing. Staring at disaster to the detriment of our own productivity or utility is quite another.

Building our future looks like how we interact in our day to day lives. It is not happening elsewhere or at another time.

It is how we live today.

Agency is everything.